I’ve edited the above radar grab to indicate my normal targeted chase area:  south of I-66, north of I-64, east of the Blue Ridge and west of U.S. Rte 301.  (I do stray outside of this box but it represents 90% of my chases.)   Does…

Showers this morning?  Not totally unexpected, but I didn’t think we’d have a line moving through this early:We do need the rain, and it looks as if this week will fill more of that need with a frontal boundary stalling in the vicinity.  Weak…

Clouds, some desperately needed rainfall (1.5″ in my back yard gauge), and high temperature of 77 degrees F today at both Stafford and Shannon airports.  It ‘s about freakin’ time we had a break from the mid-to-upper 90’s!  Thanks to the stro…

Whew!  This has been a very busy storm day, starting with the strong line that roared through DC this morning, just missing our area.  After that passage the atmosphere recovered its instability quickly with abundant sunshine and plenty of mo…

The numbers have been rolling through so thick and fast that they almost don’t boggle the mind anymore.  Today’s high temperature at Shannon Airport was 98 degrees F, and the heat index at 2:00 p.m. today was a staggering 113 degrees.  But af…

Check out this video from Russia…looks like an intense dust devil over a small pond.Meanwhile we could see storms of our own the next few days as a weak cold front slides down the coast.  Best day for chasing appears to be Thursday, but that’s i…

You really don’t want to know the forecast for this week…it’s essentially the same as last week’s:  hot and miserable early, then “cooler” toward the weekend.  Meanwhile the high temperatures tomorrow look once again to be triple digits, po…

At the risk of adding fuel to the climate change fire, I found this article that articulates (pun intended) some of what I’ve saying for several years:  we have to be very careful how we respond to climate change.  If we continue to focus sol…

Thankfully a cool front is pushing through and will usher in dryer and somewhat cooler air over the next couple of days.  As a measure of how bad today was, the heat index at the Stafford Regional Airport reached 117 degrees F and 120 degrees at S…

This line of severe-warned storms encroaching on Virginia territory reminds me of this morning’s line that woke me at 4:30 a.m.  We can thank the huge high pressure dome in the southern Plains for these fast-moving convective lines that approach u…