After a torrid beginning to June our stretch of cool days hasn’t been enough yet to balance it out so a week from now we’ll likely go into the book with an above normal month.

Before that happens though we get to enjoy another absolutely fantastic day on Tuesday with sunshine, warmth and most importantly low humidity.  This looks to be the last day of the current stretch as some humidity creeps back in Wednessday with the out and out Muggies arriving to finish the week.  At this point though it’s looking like those Muggies will also be short lived as new trough builds into the Lakes during the weekend.

Tuesday is the Meckeltte’s birthday (the big 1-1) and with June comes vacation time for your friendly neighborhood weatherguy so Bill’s Blog will be on a blog-break for a while.  Unless something monumental happens be looking for these little missives to start back up around the 4th of July.

Enjoy your day and the coming week!

Welcome to summer…well almost.  Yes we’ve talked about the beginning of summer since June 1st which is the start of ‘meteorological summer’ which runs June 1 to Aug 31.  But at 7:59 pm Friday evening the sun will be directly over the Tropic of Cancer and the what normal humans call summer will officially be here.  It’s our longest period of daylight for the year and as far south as the Arctic Circle the sun won’t set at all.

Now we had traditional summertime weather to begin the month of June with the heat and humidity otherwise known as The Muggies.  But for the last several days we’ve had a reprieve from those thanks to an upper low lodged over southern Canada that continues to pump in this delightful brand of air.  There does not appear to be any threat for The Muggies until later next week, so we do get to save some on air conditioning.

Unfortunately the upper low keeps sending little bursts of energy around it and when these swing by our rain chances increase.  A series of them will pass by the next 3 or so days with the strongest one looking to be on Saturday. and then again late Sunday.  We should begin to see ridging building in next week with a gradual return of warmth and eventually humidity.

So enjoy the last of spring and the beginning of summer…even if it doesn’t fee that way.

It is mid June but there were still about 250 really chilly swimmers tonight at Palomar pool.  We had a couple of showers pass by just to the north of that pool and one of them really sent out a pretty cool wind gust.  I guess that’s one (and one of the few) bad things about this Canadian airmass.

We’ll see the Canadian air reinforce a couple of more times before a more traditional summertime airmass arrives next week.  Until then though we’ll be treated to generally sunny mornings and little puffy decorator clouds in the afternoons.  Another little impulse will slide by Friday and bring with it another shower chance…similar to what happened Wednesday.  Saturday is looking like the best chance for rain (and it’s not an all day or heavy thing) with the strongest upper impulse in this current sequence.  After that, the aforementioned summertime airmass should begin to arrive with more warmth and more humidity.

And tonight we do have to acknowledge a ‘passing’.  The LEX 18 Skycam which has at one time or another ‘lived’ up on Big Blue downtown, The Patterson Office Tower at UK, and finally a few hundred feet up on our transmission antenna has finally bit the dust.  Actually the culprit was another lightning strike (it’s amazing that the big metal stick gets hit :-)  ) and it’s now to use our engineer’s technical term, “fried”.    So to you, the now late LEX 18 Skycam, we say thanks for the views you’ve given us over these last 9 years and we hope the view from Skycam Heaven is equally as good.

For the time being we’ve put Lexington’s traffic cameras into the skycam’s old spot on the website.

Enjoy your Thursday.

Thanks again Canada!  This is some pretty refreshing air and something we’ll get to enjoy for a few days…cherish it though because there is still a lot of summer ahead.  This little stretch could be Mother Nature’s ‘make good’ since this is what we should have enjoyed in mid May instead of the chill which transitioned straight into searing heat.

Since this is a pretty dry airmass…dewpoints are in the 40’s and 50’s!…rain chances are pretty small over the next few days.  That being said a little piece of energy rotating around the big Canadian upper low will bring with it at least a minimal shower threat late Wednesday and then again on Friday.  These rain chances are really small so don’t get too worked up over it.  By the weekend, a ridge that will be building on the Plains will begin to ooze this way so a very gradual warm up looks in store.

Did anybody else notice tonight how long it stayed light out?  With one of the longest days of the year, a new clean airmass, and a nice big full moon it was basically bright enough to read until about quarter to tonight.  It’s almost like being up at my wife’s families place up in northern Michigan (above the 45th parallel) when it stays light well past 10:00.  It’s not quite far enough north for 24 hours of daylight…but it’s closer than here!   by the way, if you want to go visit my sister-in-law just hop on Nicholasville Rd and keep driving north until it becomes the ‘Straits Highway’.

Quiet weather…short post

Enjoy your Wednesday!

There are many tightropes you walk in life…some with great peril…some with perceived peril…and some with potentially angry phone callers on the line.  Today we faced just such a tightrope here in the LEX 18 Storm Tracker Weather Center…in HD.

During the latter part of the afternoon we had thunderstorms blossoming… a few were pushing and exceeding severe limits and we were running crawls during the final holes of the US Open playoff.  The challenge…and the tightrope…was running the crawls and getting them off in between critical moments…like before Tiger’s putt on 18 or in the sudden death playoff.  I’ve never had to run a crawl that hard trying to judge what content was on the air so we didn’t mess that up.

To be honest, we caught a break this afternoon.  When Fayette County was put under a severe thunderstorm warning, which does trigger a full on air break in, NBC had just literally ended their coverage about 2 minutes beforehand and we just cut in to the end of the Ellen Show (already in progress) which although bad is not as bad as cutting into Tiger Woods winning a golf tournament for the ages.  If that would have happened…there may have been one or two phone calls with one probably from my GM.

The storms that fired late in the afternoon produced quite a bit of hail.  We’ve got pictures of quarter sized hail and had a couple of reports of golf ball sized hail out of Madison and Estill County.  Judging by the intensity of the radar returns off of the MAXTRACK Live Doppler that all seems very reasonable.  It was looking really intense around Waco and Winston around highway 52.  There is also a report floating around of 2.5″ hail in Owsley County which is tennis ball size.

A cold front was responsible for firing up these storms today. We saw a narrow ribbon of moisture…dewpoints surged into the mid 60’s and that was the fuel that was sparked by the front.  Behind this front will be some delightfully dry air that we should cherish because July is looming.

Now for a couple of entries now I’ve promised you a reading assignment.  Well here it is.   Here is some background on the man who wrote this…He was my boyhood idol.  I still have a handwritten letter from John Coleman from when I was 9 years old and wanting to be a weather watcher for my little town of Oswego, Illinois.  He wrote me a told me I had to be 15 before I would be eligible.  He was the #1 weatherguy in Chicago when I was growing up…he left to be the first weatherguy on ABC’s Good Morning America (I also have the article from when he left).  He left there to found a little cable channel called the Weather Channel.   I also had the chance to interview with him in the early ’90s when he was trying to start up a local cable news channel in Chicago…and my boyhood idol picked me to be part of his team (alas the recession of the early 90s kept it from getting off the ground). He is one of the people most responsible for the way weather is now presented on television.  He knows the science up and down…perhaps not in the pure calculus sense, but from over 40 years of studying the science.  It would be difficult to challenge his knowledge and credentials.

Anyway, enough of that background.  When you read his piece go in with an open mind.  Do your own research.  There are few things that I could add that he didn’t cover.

Well enough of that…gang, enjoy what looks to be a terrific Tuesday!

There is a severe thunderstorm watch up until 5:00 for the entire area.  It’s looking though the greatest threat is in southern and eastern Kentucky for a couple of reasons.  First off, this morning’s convection worked over the atmosphere to the north, doing what storms are supposed to do and stabilize things.  A thunderstorm is nature’s way to correct imbalances, either too warm at the surface or too cool aloft by lifting surface air upward to re-establish the balance of temperature.  The second reason also began with this morning’s storms when it laid down an outflow boundary that thunderstorms can use to fire on as the instability reaches critical levels with temperatures in the upper 80’s.   We’ll keep an eye on these storms with the MAXTRACK Live Doppler to see if anything is going to approach severe limits.

After today…a wonderfully cool and dry airmass will invade for most of the week.  A small t-shower chance exists Wednesday with a little upper level impulse…but it’s not impressive.

I’ll give you your reading assignment later.

Enjoy the afternoon and evening…and for middle age guys everywhere…go Rocco!

Ichthus must mean rain in some distant dead language.  It almost feels like we could make a prediction now for next year’s festival and just put rain in the forecast.

There has been a lot of rain…some really intense lightning…but fortunately not a lot of severe weather around today and tonight.  But there was one severe thunderstorm that did fire up and for a weather geek it was fascinating to watch.  Our Hillsboro Storm Tracker, Tommy Lambert, was in here today(amateur weather geek…since I get paid that makes me a professional geek…insert joke here________) and I got the chance to show him something that occurred earlier in the afternoon.

This is an image from our MAXTRACK 3d our LIVE Doppler from about 20 to 4:00 this afternoon.  My boss (another junior weather geek) was in with me watching this LIVE as it was actually happening before 4:00.  There had been an impressive line of thunderstorms along I-65 early in the afternoon (the reason for the t-storm watch).  Those storms actually died as they came east. When a storm dies it loses its updraft and all of the water carried high into the atmosphere by the updraft comes crashing down to Earth.  As it hits it then spreads out horizontally, like a ripples in a pond.  We were able to watch that blue line by Lawrenceburg march east-southeast against the main flow with was north-northeast.  At the same time all of the sunshine had done its work by putting a sufficient amount of heat at the surface to destabilize the atmosphere and cause ‘garden variety’ thunderstorm development in the I-75 corridor region.  These storms would have remained ordinary storms producing heavy rain and lightning given their ambient environment.  But when the outflow boundary hit these developing ordinary storms it was able to intensify them by strengthening their updrafts.  The end result was like a match on gas and BOOM the storms exploded in Jessamine County and moved into Fayette.  We had run a crawl highlighting that storm  about 5 minutes before the actual warning came out as part of the severe t-storm watch Luckily the atmosphere was not truly conducive to severe storms beforehand so all the enhancement did was turn that particular cell into a marginally severe one with just a few minor damage reports.  Still for the weather geek in all of us (and isn’t that why you read this in the first place?) this was some pretty cool stuff!

What was also cool was after the storms had moved up toward Scott and Bourbon County and they started collapsing we watched another outflow going back northwest…again pretty neat stuff.

By the way for fans of the US Open Golf Tourney…the core of rain from that cell passed right over us here at LEX 18 and if you have a satellite dish at home you know exactly what rain fade is…well we experience it too, although it takes a heavier rain to knock our signal out than your typical Directv.  That’s why you saw  my smiling face for about 10 minutes instead of Tiger Woods.  Maybe some of you would have preferred just a black screen…sorry but we can’t always help when Mother Nature overwhelms technology.

The rain should get out of here pretty quickly Saturday making the majority of it a pretty good day.  By Father’s Day our weather looks fantastic as a little bubble high passes by giving us sunshine and warm temps with pretty low humidity.  A big time cool down is coming next week to give our air conditioners a break.

I was going to give you some required reading for the weekend…but hey it’s the weekend and the only reading you should do should be around a pool or in a hammock.

Don’t forget dad this Sunday.  Cherish the time you have with him if you’re able…

Make it a great weekend!

SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH UNTIL 9:00 FOR LEXINGTON AND AREAS NORTH AND WEST.

Some popcorn t-storms have developed ahead of the main line which is back around I-65.  Any of these storm will have torrential rainfall (we’ve already had it here at the station) and some intense lightning.

Friday is here and with it another day of basking in the Muggies.  Heat and humidity really increased Thursday but thunderstorms were only isolated.  That begins to change as we progress through Friday.  The catalyst for the change is a slow moving cold front.  Yes this is the same front that spawned the tragic weather Wednesday night in the Plains and Midwest but its arrival here will be a weakened state.

The scattered thunderstorms of Friday afternoon will become more numerous Friday night and through at least Saturday morning if not a bit longer depending on the exact speed of the front through here.  I expect one good line of showers and t-storms Saturday and after that our weather should improve again…perhaps as early as Saturday afternoon.  By Sunday, Father’s Day, the weather looks great for yard work and ‘honey dos’…except wait, it’s Father’s Day so dads everywhere should just sit back and enjoy a great day with sunshine, lower humidity and plenty of early season warmth.

There are some huge changes coming next week as a fundamental shift in the weather pattern occurs.  A trough begins to establish itself over the eastern half of the country and with it much cooler air will take hold.  This should also calm down the weather in the Plains and Midwest.

Enjoy the heat of Friday…and don’t forget to say hey to dad on Sunday!

I’m starting to wonder if we should almost start feeling guilty.  We’ve had a pretty tranquil spring/early summer for the most part with just a few exceptions.  Meanwhile the weather beginning about 150 miles away has been anything but.  Historic flooding has occurred in Indiana and the soaking continues all the way to Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin.  These folks are getting hit again with more heavy rain tonight and will likely see it again tomorrow and then it moves east on Friday.  Not only that, but tonight word that a Boy Scout ranch was hit north of Omaha with at least 4 people killed just adding to this year’s already tragic death toll nationally.

Well for us, the Muggies will return Thursday and we’ll feel them again on Friday with an increasing t-storm chance.  Our best chances look to be Saturday as the Midwest system arrives.  A fundamental shift in our weather pattern looks on tap next week with a much cooler airmass next week.

After last night’s long picture laden post we decided to keep it short tonight.

Enjoy the Muggies on Thursday.