Observations of jet stream: Satellite Imagery

This high resolution visible satellite imagery of VT and HM shows the sun going down at the end of today. It confirms oue obervations of clouds being moved from west to east by the mid-latitude westerlies. A stratocumulus cloud mass (meteorologists sometimes call it a "blob of cloud" for obvious reasons) passes over the Northeast Kingdom of stratocumulus late in the day.

You can see current high resolution visible satellite imagery of New England at the Meteorology Department's Satellite page.

Observations of jet stream: WebCams

LSC Webcam imagery for Monday, 8 Sept 2008. Click here for current animation.

The LSC webcam is in the staff room on the 4th floor of the Vail Building looking southeastward over the campus in summer and eastward towards Burke Mountain in the winter. It's a good way of watching clouds develop, storms pass, and the day go by. You can guess at which direction the jet stream is moving too.

The clouds seen in this video are generally stratocumulus clouds: sometimes they look like puffy cottonballs (cumulus clouds), and sometimes they flatten out into a flat cover (a stratus deck). It looks like they are low, maybe a mile or two above the surface.

Note that even though the wind was relatively calm all day on the ground, they are moving at a good clip due to a strong westerly jet stream, pushing them towards the east. This is the norm in the middle latitudes. Winds usually increase with height in the lower 10 miles of the atmosphere due to the jet stream.

Severe Storm Reports

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.