Thursday, May 10, and radar rings.

Tonight, is my last post. I have weather observations from earlier (actually some from February that I found while cleaning up my room, but I won't go there...) and even a few old pics to prove it! Anyway, I will probably go ahead and put those up... soon... for old times sake? Anyway, I have a question for the viewer(s) tonight that my buddy Derrick brought up to me a couple of times now and practically features on his (and my) surface map tonight.

Do you see all of those circles?What ARE those? I would guess that it has to do with the doppler, perhaps some sort of distortion around the edge of each station's range... but don't the stations have overlapping ranges? So shouldn't this not happen? and why does it only happen some of the time? What causes it? Food for thought? This yahoo doesn't know, but this source thinks that similar rings (but not necessarily the same) are caused by melting snow in the upper atmosphere. Even this seemingly reputable fellow had no clue. Well after about 20 minutes I finally somehow stumbled across what seems to be the answer... and quite frankly I am a bit surprised that I did not find it sooner. It seems that this is a problem in 3d Weather imaging as well, to which the answer is a mis-computation of data derived from the radar, which does not actually check the region directly overhead, and data from other radar stations and analysis is needed to come up with the final surface map. So, is this the answer for the phenomena reproduced above? I can't say. But this is what I have found. So I'm calling it problem solved for now.

Oh yeah, weather was warm tonight at 70° F with winds of 10 mph form the South. You can clearly see that cold front coming in with some rain, if that High doesn't stall on the edge of the Rockies (dont see why it would, it's pretty well out of them now), then it will help push the Low-fueled storms out of the way and will weaken the Low which is relatively close to it. The storms are compressed along that front so they will be strong and short, afterwards we can look forward to some sun for a few days. Peace out.

*edit... turns out those spots are from lack of data. I guess there's my answer. fun fact. Not sure I believe it though, I mean, look at the number of simultaneous stations that haven't reported data. And then how is the moisture figured in?