Weather Headlines
A cool Thursday
Better weather for Friday and Saturday
A warming trend for the weekend
More unsettled weather begins Sunday evening and into next week
Main threats
Tonight: Under clearing skies we may see some scattered light frost by morning.
Widespread severe weather is not expected for the next seven days.
Baldwin’s 7-Day forecast
Daily Forecast
Today: Cooler. Scattered/isolated showers will be us much of the day. If skies clear out in time, we may even see some scattered frost by Friday morning.
Friday – Saturday: Sunny days! Friday will be breezy but Saturday should be much calmer.
Sunday: Partly cloudy, with a chance for showers and storms by evening and overnight.
Monday: Partly to mostly cloudy, with a chance for a shower or storm.
Tuesday: Showers and thunderstorms likely.
Wednesday: A shower possible very early in the morning, followed by partly to mostly cloudy skies in the afternoon.
Almanac
Yesterday’s National High and Low Temperature
High: 112 degrees at Death Valley, California
Low: 14 at Peter Sinks, Utah
Difference of: 98 degrees
Wx Hazards Across the Nation
Strong storms and flooding will threaten portions of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast today. Heat continues for the Southwest, while another storm system brings rain and snow to the Northwest.
Records
The tornado outbreak of 1909 continued into the night of the 29th and on into the very early morning hours of the 30th. Six additional deaths occurred in Middle TN after midnight. One tornado moved from Cookeville to Algood around 1:00 am. Another tornado touched down in Fentress County and trekked through Wilder. What’s bizarre is that this tornado in Wilder was from the same supercell that began just southwest of Memphis and made it all the way to the plateau!
Another twister, up to one half mile wide, struck Rugby a bit later on from another storm. That storm carved a path of destruction on up through Morgan and Scott Counties.
Today, this outbreak would likely have been found to have produced more tornadoes, as site surveying and reporting has improved by leaps and bounds since the days of this historic outbreak. It was certainly an evening and night of very long-track supercells, with many of these storms producing long-track, strong/violent tornadoes.
Weather Trivia
Q: What is the longest distance a supercell thunderstorm has ever been tracked?
a. 100 miles b. 400 miles c. 650 miles d. 800 mils e. 1,000 miles
(Answer at the bottom of the blog!)
NASA Knowledge
The International Space Station was caught passing in front of the moon on April 25th. Watch as it begins to cross from the upper left and exits at the lower right.
Long Range Outlook
The long range outlook for the first week of May continues to show cooler and wetter conditions. This is also why long-range guidance suggests a lack of severe weather for our area for the next week to ten days.
Temperature
Precipitation
Baldwin’s View-of-the-Day
This is a timelapse of the skies over Tulsa, Oklahoma after severe t-storms had crossed the area Tuesday evening. These are called mammatus clouds and they look like pouches of clouds hanging down.
Normally, clouds are formed from warm air is rising, cooling, and condensing into clouds. Mammatus kinda do this backwards. When a storm forms, the updraft carries huge amounts of warm air upwards. That air eventually goes as high as it can go and spreads out across the sky. We call that the anvil. The anvil is filled with heavier ice crystals (it’s cold up there!).
Sometimes, the ice crystals get very concentrated and begin to sink from the anvil. The stronger the updraft carrying the warm air upward, the more ice crystals that will end up in the anvil. This is why the most severe storms have the best chance for seeing mammatus. Those strong updrafts carry a lot of moist air upward!
Sinking air warms as it falls but since these are ice crystals they have to melt. Melting is a cooling process (the ice absorbs the heat for melting), so the sinking air stays cooler than the air around it, allowing the air to continue to sink down. Cold air sinks, warm air rises.
Now, as soon as the ice crystals have melted, the cooling part stops and that’s as low as the mammatus sacks get. Mammatus can be quite dramatic with a setting sun lighting the mammatus cloud sacks! They are harmless and often come after bad weather, just as they did in Tulsa. As far as I know, mammatus are the only clouds that form from air sinking.
Answer to Trivia Question
A: (d) On March 12, 2006 a supercell thunderstorm developed in northeast Oklahoma and finally lost supercellular characteristics in central Michigan. That was about 800 miles from where it first started! The storm is nicknamed the “Six State Supercell”. The storm’s life spanned a 17 hour course of time. That is definitely one for the record books!
You all have a great day!
So this may be a dumb question… and I ask on here because I can’t get a hold of you on fb messenger… you guys (weather people) mention showers, storms, thunderstorms and thundershowers… what’s the difference? Like today you mentioned this week we’ll have showers, storms and thunderstorms. Aren’t storms and thunderstorms the same thing?
Hi Jenn. It’s not a dumb question at all! We always mention showers when we don’t expect any lightning. If we expect lightning, then we say storms or thunderstorms. As you mention, there’s no difference between storms and thunderstorms. It’s just a different way of saying it. Good question!
Ah gotcha! Everytime I see the word storms I picture it worse than thunderstorms lol. Now I know 😁 thanks!