This graphic from the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center (HPC) indicates very little precipitation for our area over the next 5 days. In fact, the moisture seems to divide around our area with a wedge of cooler dryer air wedging in from the northea…

So far I’ve had exactly zero chances to storm chase this month. As evidenced in the above radar view all the setups have featured storms in the highly populated suburbia north of us (no thanks!) or to our southeast when I haven’t had the time to dive …

I think we just had it…”it” being the summer 2009 heat wave. Three consecutive days with high temperatures above 90 degrees looks to be the extent of our heat as the Bermuda High basically disappears and we head back into an unsettled East Coast tro…

This is a slow motion clip of video I shot the night of May 13th as we were watching a storm south of us in Oklahoma. We didn’t know it at the time but this storm turned out to be tornadic. After playing with the clip and some video frame grabs I thi…

Local weather forecasts for tomorrow are abuzz with phrases like “hottest day of the year” and warbling alarms of heat advisories and excessive heat warnings. Guess what? It’s typical Mid-Atlantic August weather, so why the hyperbole? One reason I c…

Jesse Ferrell of Accuweather published a blog entry today discussing the details of chasing in your own local area. Being in Pennsylvania Jesse’s experiences parallel those of ours here in the Old Dominion. He’s right on the mark in his discussion, a…

This graphic shows one forecast model’s representation of the surface situation this coming Monday afternoon. The “H” east of Florida is the “infamous” Bermuda High that will pump hot sticky air up the East Coast into our area for a few days. Forecas…

I guess it was a good thing that no storms fired within my chase radius yesterday as it turned out I wasn’t able to head out due to some important family matters. We did have a rather noisy storm scoot by just south and east of here in the wee hours t…

SPC has our area under a 5% severe risk for tomorrow, not enough for a slight risk designation. After skimming over a couple of models I tend to agree given that there won’t be much upper level wind support overhead the Mid-Atlantic. However, with th…

All summer I’ve been commenting on how we’ve had some heat and some humidity, two of the three “H’s” of a typical Virginia summer, but we hadn’t seen the third ingredient – haze – yet. Today I had to rescind that observation as the third “H” showed up…