2009.10.27
Rain taunts me for 13 hours on the highway
There appear to be no ... wet extremes anywhere on the horizon.
What dummy put these words on his blog Saturday ... oh yeah, it was me, and I was taunted by it today with 13 hours of rain on a 13 hour, 20-minute drive from Arkansas to Virginia Tuesday.
It just goes to show you that we are in the time of year when you can't take your eyes off the pattern even for a day or two. What looked like a fairly weak disturbance a few days ago ended up spinning up a strong low that has spread Gulf of Mexico moisture northward, creating a rainy Tuesday over much of the East.
If this is a sign of the El Nino-driven winter ahead ... and this kind of wet storm is very El Nino-like ... we'll have lots of interesting things to watch in the weeks and months ahead -- though many of them may just be wet like this.
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1.85" here in Hardy...if that had all been snow...well...let's just say that those forecasters that suggested that our snowfall would come in "big dumps" could just be right if this pattern holds...
Comment by Betsy — October 28, 2009 @ 5:08 am
I watched this line of rain on and off all day. As is so often the case, this storm blew a hole in an area of Floyd County, Montgomery and SW Roanoke County. This happens with snowstorms also. A detailed explanation please.
Comment by W.D. Brand — October 28, 2009 @ 9:35 am
Betsy: You may be right, but this particular setup would probably have been a snow to sleet to ice to rain setup had there been cold air involved.
WD: Since I didn't watch it all day, other than on my windshield in 4 states, I probably don't have a ready explanation. When you said "blew a hole in" do you mean it rained really hard there or that it skipped that area and left a "hole" on the radar?
Comment by Kevin Myatt — October 28, 2009 @ 12:17 pm
Looking forward to your winter outlook on Friday, from the comment you eluded to in your last report, I am predicting you will say el nino will be stronger than originally anticipated with milder temperatures and more rain than snow...BOO!!! LOL Let's hope I am wrong and that Joe Bastardi and Henry Margusity are correct!!! Glad you made it back safely!!
Comment by Scott Saunders — October 28, 2009 @ 1:47 pm
Same thing as most times is that by [blowing a hole in it]means creating an area where very little or nothing falls. Seems more pronounced in winter. Have seen a foot of snow in Greensboro and also upper Shenadoah valley and Roanoke will get a dusting to an inch or so. Not once but many times over the last 40 years. Being a contractor and plowing snow commercially, I've watched this play out time after time. In the last 12/15 years of watching radar religously, it happens more often than not. Something is causing this "parting of the waters" so to speak. WHAT??????
Comment by W.D. Brand — October 28, 2009 @ 2:51 pm
It rained pretty solidly everywhere that I saw yesterday. If the hole was something on Radar, that's likely caused by the radar itself and not because the rain skipped over parts of the area...there's a small radius around the dome that it doesn't see too well, and that area you described sounds about right for the area where that happens.
Comment by Other John — October 28, 2009 @ 3:14 pm
Kevin, the afws.net website had a major problem yesterday and early today. No rainfall totals for the Virginia counties. If you can get the "i-flows totals" for the Tuesday rain, please post on the blog. Thanks. And I am fairly sure that the "hole" that W.D. referred to was a donut with Floyd and SW Roanoke County with there being dryness in the middle. I saw it on radar late yesterday afternoon. But it ended very abruptly here and we definitely got soaked last night between 6 and midnight in SW Roanoke County near Allstate.
Comment by Doug Griggs — October 28, 2009 @ 3:17 pm
Oh, one other thing. Sometime late yesterday the Weather Channel had a brief segment with a fellow named Robinson explaining that the Tuesday storm intensified rapidly and unexpectedly becuase of tropical moisture that he claimed extended all the way back through the Gulf, southern Mexico, and the very eastern Pacific. He showed the satellite pics to prove it. There was even a tornado just west of Savannah. And as you noted, this was very much common during an El Nino. Reminds me very much of January and especially early February 1998.
Comment by Doug Griggs — October 28, 2009 @ 3:25 pm
I'm familiar with the Roanoke Valley being "snow-holed" in the winter, often due to low elevation or localized urban warming that allows snow to evaporate/melt before reaching the base of the valley. ... I rarely see Floyd and Montgomery counties do so, though Shawsville/Elliston up to Salem/Fort Lewis Mountain sometimes seem to get less in some rain events. There are some orographic factors at play, regarding the alignment of ridges, that leave localized "rain shadows" where less rain falls than more upwind areas. Likely what you have observed is related to the orographic factors at work. I've seen just enough of something similar to know that there's something to it.
In this case ... having driven through eastern Montgomery County into southwest Roanoke County in heavy rain last night ... I think it may have been a radar anomaly of some kind. There is a radar dead spot just west of Roanoke because Poor Mountain deflects some of the signal. That is most apparent in light rain and snow events when cloud tops are low.
Comment by Kevin Myatt — October 28, 2009 @ 3:49 pm