Biking The Lack Of Weather Stress Away
Posted by Jeff Gammons on Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 9:21 am
Tagged as: Jeffs Personal, Current Severe WX
Looking For Some Real Weather, Head To The Plains?
Well, I’m about over all this nice, stable weather here in Florida. This ridging, and abundance of dry air, sinking motion, and lack of anything is beginning to take it’s toll on me. Early April had me out everyday shooting storm video, and now all I’m left with is rain free forecasts. Hoping for a pattern change as we get ready to close out the month of April. The extended look into the forecast computer models is not very promising over the Southeast and Florida for rain. The next possible decent shot looks to be around Monday / Tuesday, with the passage of a moderate cool front. Then next week looks like we might be in another blocking pattern into the extended forecast if you were to believe the GFS. Ugh!
Getting Out On The Trails, Good For The Heart and Mind
All this nice weather has allowed me to get out and Mountain Bike some trails, and over the last two days I’ve biked about 23 miles of trails. Brought along a small Mini-DV camera that I mounted to the bike incase I came across anything worth shooting video of, which last night was the sunset. The amount of wildlife you can come across while well off-road is quite impressive. I’ve seen about 5 snakes in the last few days, two of them being Rattlesnakes. I’m sure a lot of animals are moving around a bit in search of food and water since it’s been so dry lately.
Tornadoes and Supercells Active On The Plains
It’s nice to see fellow Storm Chasers out on the Plains already intercepting and capturing beautiful tornado video scenes out over the open rolling High Plains. CNN playing the heck out of some tornado video from West Texas Supercells yesterday. Congrats to all out chasing yesterday, and looks like there is more to come this afternoon with a moderate risk of severe storms and tornadoes in Southern Nebraska and a large portion of Kansas. The Central Plains states look to be the main severe weather action for today. I’ll be monitoring the situation out there via internet while sitting under this outstanding high pressure ridge with all this subsidence. [grin]

(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Starting the day off with a little fog and smoke from some brushfires well south in the Everglades, but this should clear out once the breeze circulations get going. Today is expected to be another fine, warm and dry day, which makes a good day to get out and plant a tree here on Earth Day 2008. I plan to get out and plant a small tree in the yard this afternoon (likely a coconut palm / my favorite ). After that, I plan to get out and enjoy some of the day outside maybe shooting some wildlife video or landscape time lapse scenes. I can’t be spending Earth Day sitting at the computer today.
A uneventful weekend weather-wise, and this trend looks to continue through much of this week. Unfortunately, a large mid and upper-level stacked low, will slowly drift over North Carolina and then offshore into the Western Atlantic. This will place much of the Southeast and Florida in a northwest flow and subsidence, keeping things pretty dry. We’ve been dealing with dry weather now for about 10 days, and we had a small shot on Sunday to see maybe a decent shower, and the most we saw was a 10 minute sprinkle with the passage of the old weakening frontal boundary.
Looking around the world at the current active tropical weather, there is Typhoon Neoguri, a once more organized typhoon, but still remains a dangerous cyclone. The storm first moved over the Paracel Island and is now brushing the large island of Hainan off the coast of China. Strong winds and surge are already being felt on the island. As you can see in this satellite tracking map and imagery of Typhoon Neoguri, the storm look less organized, but still holding a well developed circulation and convection.
There is currently a massive low pressure storm system over the western Atlantic Ocean off the Mid Atlantic coast and west-northwest of the Island of Bermuda. This has been a very slow moving storm system over the last few days, and it has become a large surf producer up and down the east coast of the United States. Here in Florida, the surf has been extremely elevated for days, with large pounding swells, with wind chop on top of it. I haven’t had the time to get down to the area beaches recently due to me working on editing video for a friend, but I know someone who has.
Unfortunately, I can’t get away to go and hang out and watch the large waves roll in until maybe tomorrow, but they look to be peaking now or even yesterday. Other than that, no much in the weather department to chat about, just trying to get some work done here before the active severe weather returns. Thanks to Chris for sharing some of his images of the waves yesterday.
I’m back! It’s been a few days since my last post, as I took some time to relax and catch up with some family time over the weekend. After all the active Florida chasing a week ago, I was behind on things around here and needed to step away for a few days and get things back in order. I’m waking up this morning to unseasonable cold temperatures outside, with readings around 48F. Now this is just uncalled for! I thought we put a end to letting these flush cold fronts from moving into South Florida. Over the weekend it was nearly 90F here, and today we’ll be lucky to reach the mid 70s. Hopefully, this will be the last significant round of chilly weather this season for south Florida, and we can get back to that early summer-like storm pattern.
I’m late getting in on the arm chasing of the current ongoing tornado event in Texas and Oklahoma. I’ve learned of a large damaging tornado that has produced damage in the town of Breckenridge, Texas, with injuries. Also Storm Chaser Verne Carlson, was reporting a possible large wedge tornado on the ground outside of Mineral Wells, Texas around 7:00pm CT. This is still uncomfirmed, and it could of been a large butt dragging wall cloud per Verne’s late evening update on StormTrack. There are still several impressive possible tornadic Supercell thunderstorms roaming over north Texas this evening.






