Smitty's attempt to educate and to a much lesser extent, entertain, about all facets of life; but primarily the meteorological and the climatological aspects of the earth sciences.
Ah yes...I love the names of these "Super Typhoons" in the western Pacific. Jelawat...sounds like a new meteorological unit describing the incredible amount of power the atmosphere releases during one of these enormous tropical storms. I know; I hear some of you reading this right now saying, "Whaaat, whaaat?"...How about James Watt (1736-1819), engineer extraordinaire! The inventor of efficient & powerful steam engines, the concept of horsepower, and the SI unit of power we all commonly refer to as a Watt! I wonder if he invented the "Power I" and 3 yards in a cloud of dust as well? Sorry, I digress...
Onto my point about Typhoon Jelawat...he/she, I'm not really sure which, will most certainly affect the long wave pattern over the north Pacific the next week and thus we will feel the downstream effects ushered upon us as a result of the typhoon's energy becoming entrained into the upper air pattern. You can clearly see the energy in the upper air initialization as seen below...look over by Japan and the deep red circle...that is the typhoon.
And here is the typhoon...
...and its proposed track re-curving along the Asian continent.
Most, if not all, times of the year when a storm of this strength moves NE along the Asian continent, it drives a ridge up into western O Canada and then allows an unleashing of polar air towards the eastern part of North America. And the modeling seems to think this will once again be the case. As you can see above, there is a bubble of lower than normal heights presently over us and anyone who spent Thursday and Friday outside in these parts noticed how quickly the air mass changed by later Friday evening on a fresh NW wind. (In fact, some even believed there was a bit of a windchill perceived during Friday Night Lights!) Here are the depicted upper air charts from both the Euro and the GFS for 10 days out...both show a rather deep trough here in the eastern NA! Note also the huge ridge over western O Canada...
So how does that look at the surface in terms of temps? Well, I'm glad you asked. Here are a series of maps starting with Sunday (September 30) of temps compared to normals. The 1st week of October puts normal maxes into the upper 60s and the normal mins ~50ºF. The maps below are the average of all the ensembles which tend to dampen the extremes of individual runs and thus are called the Ensemble Mean. These runs are most certainly suggesting once past this upcoming midweek period, the 1st 2 weeks of October look to be most assuredly BELOW NORMAL here near KMDT! And even NOAA's CPC agrees! Amazing for them to even deviate from anything that remotely suggests cooler than normal wx...if you catch my drift! Below is a brutally cool 8-14 day outlook for early autumn! That map would also suggest a widespread Lake Effect outbreak over the northern lakes!
And now here are the ensemble means...first for Sunday...
The warmest day of the next 3 weeks...and possibly until next April will be Wednesday...
By next weekend, the temps will cool off once again; possibly to levels that allow for frosts in much of south central PA. Wow! That is some WIDESPREAD anomalous cold!
And it continues until the middle of October if you believe the modeling...get ready for some cool/cold MLB playoff games in Baltimore, Washington, and or NY!
In fact, the 7 day running mean (average of 7 days' of mean temps) looks very much below normal!
That above map is very cool as is this project below called "Starry Night" from Alex Parker, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who created this mosaic-style image out of publicly available downloads of NASA’s top 100 images from the Hubble Space Telescope in celebration of Hubble’s 22nd birthday!
And here is the close-up of the images...pretty wild!
When I read/saw this, I was very much intrigued! Especially since a week ago I pulled out an album from the old music stash and dusted off Don McLean's ballad...I hope you enjoy it as I did!
And enjoy your week's end while rooting on those Baltimore Birds since the "Sillies" season is now officially reckoned as "fail".
Smitty
AA: After a brief warm up this upcoming midweek period, temps will be much below normal into the middle of October. Good for hunting the over populated 4 legged critters roaming PA's woods, fields, and developments!
