China to make sure it doesn’t rain on Olympics

Cloud seeding and weather manipulation used to be pretty popular in the US but now I don’t hear anyone talking about it. However, it appears the Chinese Meteorologists have been suing weather modification for a while now and say not only can they make rain but they say they can also stop it. They guarantee that it will not rain on [one of?] the stadiums built for the Olympics that has an open roof. Pretty insane stuff, but it sounds interesting to me.

Read the article »

Related: Wikipedia – “Weather Control”
(Note: take the whole thing with a grain of salt… since the part about Hurricane Katrina has the wrong year listed… haha.)

New page added

I’ve added a new page called Weather Center with links to all the weather sites I typically use.  Check it out! If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know by commenting on this post. Thanks!

Warming up… for a few hours

This morning was really nice, spring-like weather. Other then the fact that winds were howling around 20+ MPH, temperatures were in upper 40s, reaching a high of 48 around 7:00 AM. After this temperatures shot down- it was a noticeable difference between 9:20 and and 9:50 when my roommate and I went out to and came back from breakfast this morning. After that, temps hovered around 40 for the remainder of the day with heavy winds, with the highest recorded gust in Millersville being near 40 MPH.

Short Term Forecast

Overnight: Clear. Low near  19.
Thursday: Skies will be clear most of the day, becoming cloudy after sunset. Hi: near 40. Lo: near 30
Friday: I think Friday is going to be an all-rain event, but there’s talk of icing and such. I don’t see it happening, but I’ll post more then.

Long Range Outlook

I don’t see any major storms upcoming. Look for a welcome warm-up the next few days with a chance for precip early in the week. Again, another rain event is likely. Oh well… there’s still a whole lot of winter left to go.

Stormy February Ahead

February looks to be stormy… but that doesn’t mean we’ll see snow. The NAO has been up and down the past few days. I’ve decided to save the NAO Ensemble forecast each day and to, eventually, put together animations to show how the NAO is trending over the course of week. It should be pretty cool to see. It looks cool now even with only a few days of data. I just wish other places put out an NAO forecast or if there was at least a more detailed look at it. Oh well. I hardly understand it as it is. Haha.

As far as the short term goes, Friday looks to be a fun day as a low pressure system develops out of the gulf and rides up inland states before going out to sea. This storm looks to drop a lot of precipitation everywhere it goes, including here in Millersville. With the NAO nuetral, the storm could dump some wintery-type precip, but I don’t think this storm will be anything major. If there is a good chance of snow I’ll post something later on.

Disappearing Satellite Dishes!

For the best few day I’ve been browsing around different weather sites. See, eventually (in a few months or so) I’d like to build my own weather portal for my friends and myself so all the data I need is in one place. Today I was checking on Intellicast.com. Intellicast is owned by WSI, who is a sister company to The Weather Channel. WSI is a big name in the weather business and I was thinking, hey, I wonder where they are headquarted- I bet it would be a fun place to visit with my fellow MET majors! So, I found their address and decided I wanted to see what their building looks like. I visited AccuWeather when I was in middle school and wanted to see how WSI’s building looked. I check out Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft’s Live.com. It all looks pretty cool. Then I find something really weird.

I was lucky to find out that the location was available in “Bird’s eye view” on Live.com. These images are taken with an airplane that criss-crosses the land and makes for a neat feature. Anywho, I was looking and saw a small road that lead to a grassy area where some satellite dishes were. Kinda weird, since most places keep them on the roof (WSI already had several on their roof), but not entirely unheard-of. I proceeded to rotate the image (you can rotate the images to view from the North, East, South or West) to find that they had disappeared! Check out the image I made below:

Check it out for yourself:

• Google Maps
• Yahoo Maps
• Live Local (Click on “Bird’s eye” at the top left)

Not really weather related, but interesting nonetheless.

I was right!

I’ve been slacking on my posting recently due to getting back to school and such, but I’m back now.

We’ve had a pretty interesting week of weather here in Millersville.  About three inches of  snow fell on Thursday and a light dusting fell on Tuesday. As far as the 13th storm, I was pretty much correct in my prediction of trace. Tuesday’s event was kind of unexpected, lasting about an hour. Thursday’s snow was pretty cool. It snowed all day and finally ended with sleet and freezing drizzle falling into the evening hours… but the snow didn’t last long! Friday, most of the snow melted. What was left froze over last night and remains there this morning.

Short-term

Tonight we may see a shot of snow quickly, but I doubt much of anything will fall here at Millersville. Sunday and Monday will be cold with temperatures struggling to reach the freezing mark each day.

Long-range

We may see some light snow Tuesday night. After that there is no certanty as to what the weather pattern may bring us, but it looks to be an active period. The NAO forecast has been going up and down for the rest of the month so there’s not much consistency among the models for the rest of the month either. We’ll just have to wait and see!

Coming up in a little bit: Some pictures from the snow on Thursday.

Calling Trace

I was excited for this storm, but as temperature becomes an issue now, I’m going to call trace for the storm- less than an inch. However, if the temperature dips a few degrees, we could be in for something like 4 inches of snow. Though, I don’t see that happening right now. We’ll see. For now, I’m saying trace to an inch if temperatures don’t dip too low- which I don’t see them doing.

Back to Millersville tomorrow!

Friday look at the Monday storm possibilities

We’re now within the 84  hours of the storm meaning that the NAM and GFS can now be used to forecast… though I still don’t like what they’re saying. Both are pushing the system out to sea so far that Millersville would just be in for a possible snow shower on Monday.

Henry Margusity [Accuweather Sr. Meteorologist / Svr Expert] has posted a ‘low confidence’ snow map, though I’m a little upset because I really don’t feel that there is enough consistency with everything to make a forecast. I understand he does state blatantly that there is very low confidence, but I feel that he should have published multiple maps with different possibilities to cover all his bases. But hey- he does have a degree and has been doing this for a while, so he know more than I do.

With all that said, I do like what he is saying with the map that has put out, giving us in the Lancaster about 3 inches or so. I sure wouldn’t mind a nice snow shower the first day back. However, Eric Horst [Millersville Weather Station Manager / Director] has a ‘first call’ of nothing to an inch or two, which I am guessing he is saying with the latest runs pushing the storm too far off the coast.

My call? Not enough confidence to say either way… though I will say I’d like a nice little snowstorm, I’m not sure what’s really going to happen. Next update tonight or Saturday sometime.

Jan 13/14 storm

Nothing has changed. Everything has changed. I’ve seen model runs with a nice nor’easter with a good amount of snow for Millersville, and the latest with a possible shower (of rain). I have no idea. Models have no idea. Oh well. I’ll be making my official forecast sometime Saturday, most likely in the evening and will publish it after I verify with the 0z run around midnight. As of now, my call is: I don’t know.

In other news, I’m declaring right now that there will not be any election coverage on my blog whatsoever since I’m already sick of it. I’m all for politics- but enough is enough with the coverage. So there you have it: Marking Time ii is politics-free.

Mid-January storm possibilities

Well it looks like we’re in store for cold, storms, and maybe both occurring at the same time as we move in to January… don’t get too excited, though.

Short Range (Next 5 days)

Next chance of precip is going to be in the morning hours Wed. Jan 9th, but nothing substantial for those of us in SE PA. The next storm will be very well developed from what I can see, with the low getting down to 996 and will be west of us in PA, moving north-northeast towards Maine. Significant rainfall is possible in SE PA all day Friday.

Long Range (6 days +)

Here’s where it gets interesting… for a number of reasons. For one, theres a big storm that roars up on Tuesday (Jan. 15th)… but it’s way off the East coast. However, this happened last time we had a big northeast storm, with the storm coming closer and closer inland as the time became closer. We’ll see if this happens again. As of the latest run, but it looks like it will be cold enough for snow. After this point the GFS goes ahead and has no idea what to do, making up stuff as it goes along. Another reason of interest? The NAO. Check this out:

Click the image for the latest NAO forecast. What I can tell from this is after Jan. 8th, the models are very inconsistent, especially past the 16th (the dotted vertical line). Remember, negative NAO can mean northeast snow storm. A zero or positive value, not so much. For more information about what the NAO is, see Answers.com.