Severe storm reports of damage associated with thunderstorms (mostly) is compiled by the National Weather Service at the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) in Norman, Oklahoma. You can access their website on the course weatherpage. You can view todays reports by clicking on the "Reports" links on the menu at the top of the SPC site. Click here to view the more detailed updated reports for Sept. 3, 2008 (9 PM version shown above). You can click to previous days' reports at the top of the page. Note that what's left of tropical depression Gustav is still triggering some tornado activity and flooding along the southern Mississippi River.
Closer to home, a line of thundershowers seems to be triggering hailstorms in the Berkshires just to the south of Vermont. The radar below for this Wednesday evening shows storms moving southward from Vermont and into the Berkshires (click on image for animation). You may have seen the towering clouds move past us to our west during sunset today. The red colors show the storms that were probably generating the hail.The direction of the storms is somewhat unusual. Usually storms will move in from the south. It explains why the SPC missed issuing a watch for these. To be fair, they were also probably watching the tornadoes in Louisiana more closely, because they are much more dangerous.
The southward path of the New England storms can be explained by the conterclockwise circulation around the low pressure system situated off the shores of New England. As discussed in class, this results in northerly winds winds FROM the north over New England (see Sea-level Map below). They move the thunderstorms southward into Massachusetts.
