Today was what my wife calls a Mid-Atlantic “Chamber of Commerce” day: beautiful blue skies and temperatures in the low 70’s. It wasn’t much good for storm chasing, but it certainly was a great day to visit the Blue Ridge Mountains to check out the f…

As I pontificated in a previous post, potential chase setups this time of year often turn out to be rather disappointing, and today was no exception. The widespread overcast ahead of the convergence zone / front minimized the instability, and all we …

Yep, things are continuing to progress. The SPC Day 2’s are now calling for a slight risk tomorrow, bumping up the probabilities of severity from 5% to 15% for the region east of I-95. Their discussion used the “t” word again today, but the convectiv…

Looks like the SPC agrees that the models are showing some severe potential for Saturday. The accompanying discussion actually mentions the “t” word (tornado), altho’ with the above 5% probability graphic there doesn’t appear to be a large chance of t…

Both these model depictions show a decent amount (for late October) of mixed layer CAPE in the Mid-Atlantic sometime between early Saturday afternoon and early evening. Other views show significant wind shear (speed and directional) and helicity (rota…

Our road trip last week involved driving through parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and southwest Virginia. The weather was gorgeous for the first part of the week, but by Thursday morning the cold front had passed through Lexington KY, leavi…

We’ve been out of town for a few days on a trip to Kentucky, and we’d hoped to see some gorgeous fall foliage as we crossed the spine of the Appalachians in West Virginia. Alas, such was not to be. There was color but not much of it, and what was the…

We’ve had absolutely gorgeous weather here in the Mid-Atlantic the past week or so, with bright blue skies, light winds, and high temperatures in the 70’s. This is the kind of weather most folks drool for, especially after a few weeks of summer’s “th…

This radar image shows a very nice severe-warned (hail) cell just north of Warrenton that is the end of a convective line associated with a cold front traversing the Mid-Atlantic. Earlier this afternoon I was slightly tempted to jump in the chasemobil…

Today’s showers provided an interesting convective backdrop to a somewhat chaotic sky, but there really wasn’t anything chaseable. Tuesday may prove different, however, as the SPC has us under a “SEE TEXT” (5% probability of severe weather) given the …