After record breaking warmth for late October, a cold front arrives on Wednesday that will bring us back to our seasonal "normals" thru the weekend. That should mean daytime highs 70-75 with nighttime lows 50-55 SS and 40-45 NS. With low humidity, this is the good feel air we enjoyed for much of October. Colder air will arrive for the first week in November with maybe the first freeze/frost north of Lake P.
I enjoyed spending time with my wife's family in Boston. Got to see her nephew, James (12yr. old) score 3 goals in a soccer tourney. Quite a nice visit. Also had dinner with a long time mentor Pete Leavitt, who wondered if Richard was ever a hurricane. Pete is a big data man and could find NO ground truth winds greater that 55-60 mph. His concern is NHC keeps relying on satellite technology and recon data in determining wind speeds, but we rarely find what is measured at "flight level' occurring on the ground. Pete believes, and so do I, that this "technology upgrade" contaminates the long term climatology records by making storms stronger than they really are. Was Richard really a hurricane? NHC made it a strong Cat. 1 at 90 mph. No such winds were observed on the ground. This is not a new observation as wind engineers at Texas Tech made the same comments years ago.
2 comments:
You guys both know there is a big difference between flight level and surface level winds. Just because your city or town didn't have a measurable 74+ mph wind speed, does not mean it did not occur, it just means it did not occur where it was in a measurable spot. NHC forecasts a 1-minute sustained wind at an elevation of 10 meters (about 33 feet) over an open water exposure with the help of buoy or coastal over-water platforms, but there aren't many of them and very often these observations sites do NOT measure the strongest winds. We all know that winds over land are weaker than winds over water because surface roughness over land is greater than over water and causes sustained winds to lessen, plus land wind observations are isolated any most often don't meausre the strongest winds unless they get lucky.
Glad to see you back, Bob!! Weather has been boring with out you!!
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