Stephen Mullens

Would like a history book with a good section on the expansion of surface observations in the 1800s in North America and Europe. Anyone know of one?

Last week, I was trying to figure out how close TCs had to get for Fujiwara to take place and ran across this image. I'm glad you made your plot to help put this plot in context, though. (Seems 500mi is a rough guide, but will depend on context.)

Why don’t we have a horror movie that takes place in a Spirit Halloween? 🎃🦇

Oh, I know about training data. Suffice it to say that for now the HAFS still has something to say that AI doesn't for intensity.

So, if AI models are good at track, but physics models are good at intensity, are we going to see a meld at some point?

At least as far as effective landfalls go, Imelda is only the third landfalling storm this year following Barry and Chantel. And it will turn out that not all I-storms are big baddies.

Looks like I may have gotten the invest wrong. 94L. oops.

In this solution, the TC doesn't strengthen because the shear is displacing the rain to the north. But the divergence in that area keeps that convective area strong as the storm approaches the coast.

This divergence is a result of both changes in jet curvature east of the trough (sub to super-geostrophic wind) and from the wind accelerating into the jet streak (4-quadrant model). In fact, this seems to be a situation where the jet streak is the greater influence of the two.

The jet stream and 93L interaction in two days will lead to a lot of upper-level divergence on the north side of the storm. These are calculations from GFS data. 🧵

Reject it if you want, it’s your website! 🤣

This might be too crazy and I haven’t tried it myself to see what it looks like: line width 1.25x the others, not dotted or dashed, alpha=0.8. Or something to that effect.

But I like that the AI models are differentiated from the physics models. That kind of distinguishing between products should be more prevalent, IMO.

Good job as always!

The best track being a dotted black line makes it one of the lesser visible lines on the charts.

In our current 30-year climatological period (1991-2020), the Atlantic is tied for the record low number of hurricanes to date. Neat, but nothing to scream about.

If you look at just the last 30 years (1995-2024), this is the longest the Atlantic has gone without 2 hurricanes.
smoothedweather.com

Gabrielle is giving it another go tonight.

Teaching hand map analysis with upper air is just sadder than it was last year. It's harder to draw the ridge in the northwest if the data doesn't exist.

No more universal experience than paying for paper towels and later realizing it’s toilet paper.

Clearest graph I’ve seen about social media influence. This was cited by @gelliottmorris.com in his Strength in Numbers blog about political violence.

open.substack.com/pub/gelliott...

Epitome of false advertising!
(They are quite good though.)

The Atlantic tropical season has gone from ahead of to behind pace for progress in number of TCs and ACE. In the heart of the season, climatology has the most slope and any lull seems dramatic. Then again, climatology has that slope for a reason, right?

We'll take the pause; season ain't over.

CL-Champions League

Chelsea Women began their season on Friday.

My season expectations: How can the expectation be anything other than at least making the Champions League final with a justifiable hope at winning it? We'll see if we can beat Barcelona.

I really do not find conspiracies to be a treat. It's one thing to be like "what's up with school cafeteria pizza," but chemtrails, anti-vax, Q-anon were not a treat and Dems seem to want to head in that direction. I don't like it.

Student: “I was just shy of two weeks old when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.”

Reminds me I need to share another edition of “college students’ age during big events.”

Oh good, the NYT confirmed he’s alive. Glad that conspiracy got sorted. Can we not do that level of conspiracy theory again?

Happy Fall to all who celebrate!! 🍂🍁

Chelsea FC micro-takes: The home Chelsea radio commentators couldn't believe the team was up 2-0 as they had played so poorly. But the stats were all in Chelsea's favor. We may never know the truth. smoothedweather.com/consideratio...

I don’t think grabbing onto “I bet he’s secretly dead” is a good version of fighting fire with fire.

Made a map of TC “shorties,” since I’d never seen one before. Mostly, the TCs either quickly make landfall or travel over cooler water. The tracks ending in the eastern Caribbean “graveyard” are notable, too. Red are this year’s 3 shorties so far.
smoothedweather.com/tropical/

With severe weather, at some point the convective outlook is pointless and the warning is all that matters. But at least those are the same day.

With TCs, the outlook product is increasingly pointless starting ~3 days to landfall. The cone’s problem may be poor use by meteorologists.