I’m slacker guy that hasn’t blogged in a while, I’ll blame it on an island vacation and then trying to get back into the swing of things. Several supercell thunderstorms developed in southwestern Kansas on Wednesday evening and produced several tornadoes. We should some pretty good video at 5pm today, shot just outside of Garden City, Kansas.

Thought it was a good opportunity to sharpen up the radar skills so I used X-Vision (think of it as x-ray for radar) and took some vertical cross-sections of the storms. The image on the left shows three distinct supercells to the south of Garden City and southwest of Dodge City, about 50 minutes after the middle cell produced the tornado outside of Garden City. You can see a well defined hook echo to the right of the fainl s in Ulysses and a V-Notch on the opposite side of the storm.

An X-Vision slice from the same time showed a decending reflectivity core (a little farther back than the slice I’m showing here) and a BWER (bounded weak echo region). The BWER is the area that is “missing”  precipitation on the SW flank of the storm, but surrounded by intense echo. If the shape of the storm in the slice is a woman’s high heel shoe. the BWER is the area between the 4″ heel and the rest of the shoe. This is in the hook echo and represents the location of the tornado that was reported outside of Plymell at the time this image was taken. Even though we don’t show X-Vision all that often for storms in southern Colorado on the air, this is the type of analysis we’re doing on storms when we aren’t on television! I was posting updates on twitter pretty extensively during this storm, you can follow me at www.twitter.com/STORMTRACKER_13

Mixed feelings myself, but it is what it is.  Looked scary for awhile under the bursts of heavy snow, and while some areas received as much as 3″ to 5″ on the grass, it sure didn’t last very long.  Thankfully roadways were only impacted over a short period of time, and not to the extent they would have been earlier in the year, here are some screen captures of the “action” this morning courtesy of our Neighborhood Weather Network…

Thanks to those of you that sent us your photos by the way, we do appreciate seeing and sharing them.  Anyone can do this by e-mailing any photos you’d like to share to KRDOWEATHER@gmail.com.  Have a great week!

Marty V

This information was compiled by the National Weather Service…If you are doing any gardening this spring and summer, this info could be helpful and interesting!  Enjoy!

Alamosa Freeze Data

• Average Date of First Freeze……….September 11^th
• Earliest First Freeze……………………………….August 20^th, 1938
• Average Date of Last Freeze…………………June 9^th
• Latest Freeze of the Season…………………June 29^th, 1945

Colorado Springs Freeze Data

• Average Date of First Freeze…………..October 1^st
• Earliest First Freeze……………………….September 1^st, 1911
• Average Date of Last Freeze……………May 8^th
• Latest Freeze of the Season……………June 3^rd, 1951

Pueblo Freeze Data

• Average Date of First Freeze…………….October 8^th
• Earliest First Freeze…………………………………September 9^th, 2001
• Average Date of Last Freeze…………………..April 30^th
• Latest Freeze of the Season…………………..June 2^nd, 1919

We’ll keep things mostly quiet in the weather department this week with sunny skies and warm temperatures. However, it is Seveere Weather Awareness Week in the state of Colorado. Each day of the week, we’ll focus on a different aspect of severe weather. For a link to more information about the week, click here.

…a forecast comes together?
I hope our slow-moving system didn’t catch you off guard over the past couple of days. We had been talking about it on-air since last weekend really. On Monday, Marty and I began talking about potential snowfall totals with this storm. I have to give a lot of credit to him with this one. He said he had seen this scenario before and knew what it was capable of producing. Below is the projected snowfall totals he gave Friday morning. These projections really didn’t change much from what we had been mentioning earlier in the week.

As you can see from some of the snowfall reports we received, our snowtracker estimates were pretty dead-on.

Of course, as I’m writing this (11:45 a.m.) it’s still snowing so some of these totals might have to go up. As fun as this storm has been, I’m looking forward to the week ahead with a lot of sunshine and warmer temperatures!

I got this email from Nolan Doesken, our state climatologist. He is in need of volunteers to measure and report precipitation. Here is what he had to say:

Josh,
If you ever have a chance and the right situation, could you try to mention to your viewers the opportunity and need that we have for volunteers to help measure and report precipitation. We have a good number of volunteers near Colorado Springs and Pueblo but not nearly as many as we have in comparable areas north from Monument. We have volunteer leaders in Colorado Springs and Pueblo, plus our regional coordinator Tom Magnuson with NWS who would be willing to speak on camera if needed.
The fact is that there will be a terrible flash flood in your area one of these days. Radar reports and flood warning networks in your county will help make people aware, but sometimes a few people with rain gauges and weather awareness may make the difference in documenting flooding and motivating action.
It has now been 12 years since the last really extreme flash flood in Colorado (Fort Collins, July 28, 1997 followed by Pawnee Creek (northeast Colorado on July 29th, 1997). I feel the need to make sure as many people as possible appreciate the risk we face each year when it comes to flash flooding.
To encourage people to join CoCoRaHS, just remind them to go to www.cocorahs.org and click the ‘Join CoCoRaHS” button on the upper right hand side of the webpage.

Best wishes,

Nolan Doesken
Colorado State University

Pretty moring around here really, here are a couple of views from the Neighborhood Weather Network…

Now about that storm…

I’ve written extensively about it already on our Latest Forecast Page so I won’t revisit all of that here.  I more wanted to talk about communicating this kind of stuff, and some of the thought process behind what I say.  Zach mentioned this morning something along the lines of “hanging on my every word”.  Well, I don’t feel that important, but I have learned over the years that what I say will affect people’s plans, and I want them to be able to make good decisions so I always ask myself the folowing question…

What would I tell my wife?  See, my wife could care less how things work, or why, like many of you she just wants the bottom line.  Problem of course is that I cannot always give her the bottom line with confidence being that I do what I do.  My point here is that obviously I have a close, personal and trusting relationship with her (as you would hope having been married for a long time), and so I’m more comfortable giving her my “gut feeling” before I would reveal that on television.  The internal wrestling for me is that sometimes I wonder if that ends up being unfair as opposed to responsible?  The responsibility argument comes from a sense of humility, I feel like I know what I don’t know…

A storm like the one coming in isn’t as simple as we make it out on TV.  Where it tracks is important, but how quickly the cold air with it moves over the mountains, where the eastern edge of that cold air settles, how that cold air orients itself relative to the terrain, how long it might stay in a favorable orientation, what the intesity of precipitation will be, what the magic snowfall elevation will be as the storm loses some of its cold air, how much melting will occur during the event and will it will reintensify as it crosses over the mountains are just some of the other questions that need to be answered.  Point is I don’t know exactly what will happen (never do really), but what I do know is that my gut tells me there will be some hefty snowfall totals over the higher terrain.  So I wrestle with whether or not to communicate that several days in advance and risk “scaring” people unnecessarily (if it doesn’t work out) as opposed withholding the info that I know they’d like to appear “non-committal”, perhaps leaving some surprised if a strong storm does in fact materialize.

I tell my wife what I do because I trust her not to hold it against me if I’m wrong.  Over time I have sensed that I’ve built of enough trust with my viewers, and I think I can be reasonably sure that trust goes both ways.  I don’t want to help the competition any ;-), but my wife wasn’t surprised by the blizzard of ‘97, nor the one in ‘03, and I can make that claim in most instances when significant winter storms have affected my life.  While I’m not suggesting that this storm will become either of those memorable storms yet, I did tell her to cancel plans to Denver on Friday, and I’d extend that advice to anyone living above say 6500 feet or so?  I trust that if it doesn’t happen you’ll forgive me, but I wanted you to know what I believe will occur with a storm like this.  Do with that what you will and we’ll see what happens…

This Easter was very similar to last year’s Easter Sunday. Last year I woke up to about 4 or 5 inches of snow in Old Colorado City. My parents were visiting from Ohio and it was the first big snow at my house of last season. It was very simliar today with beautiful snow this morning; big wet flakes and calm wind. Of course it wasn’t so pretty when snowflakes turned to rain and snow on the ground turned to slush. Good news is we got much needed moisture out of this Easter storm. And people had fun with it as well…amazing packing snow!

As you can see from the graphic above, we’re starting Sunday morning with some breezy conditions. Those gusts were reported around 9:00 a.m. We’ll be breezy today as our system from Saturday continues to track eastward, but we won’t see the strong winds we had yesterday. Check out some of the gusts from Saturday:

The wind created reduced visibilities in the areas that saw snowfall Saturday. The Palmer Divide had some of the worst conditions with snow totals around 4 to 5 inches.