Kritikal

Here’s my first catch-up post on both the recent severe weather we’ve had here in the Metro Detroit area, and the solar weather, which is quite exciting at the moment.

Severe Weather on 2007/06/02
With a giant low off in the Plains slowly moving our way, and the impending injection of Beryl moisture, we seemed primed for a few storms systems. The problem we had leading into Saturday was the lack of initiation and convergence; all the ingredients were there, but we had no spoon to stir it all up.

Thanks to the numerous outflow boundaries from recent cells and the lake, we did have one cell that produced up to pea sized hail. Sitting at home in Plymouth I was watching the radar as a system was building and moving into Washtenaw county. Unfortunately my new condo has the patio facing north making it quite difficult to see severe weather until it’s already on top of me. I did catch some excellent pictures of new cumulus towers building to the east. As I could see the sky getting quite dark to my southwest I decided to make a dash to a local Meijer in hopes of getting some better shots. Sure enough there was a nice shelf cloud headed right for me, though it seems every picture I took was blurry.

After watching it approach for a few minutes I decided to head farther east to my parents house so I could get a nice west view from their porch, and a good glance at the radar. About 2 miles west my father, at the city park for a city birthday celebration, was frantically getting people to cover and packing up his things. He reported pea-sized hail for a brief time and 55 mph winds.

As the system approached it lost some of its steam and didn’t amount to more than heavy rain and 30 mph winds. Even still, it certainly was fun to chase about locally, albeit, slowly, through the cities. Afterwards I checked out and saw there was a new line building south of Grand Rapids that was heading ENE, but this sputtered and headed more northward as the night drew closer.

Our next chance for severe weather is Thursday and Friday as a new low is moving in. Right now we’ve cooled off quite considerably to 55F but a nice rebound is in order over the coming days.

Below are a few pics I snapped of the system:

This Saturday, June 8th, we’re due to get another low pressure system entering the Midwest that should bring a strong potential for severe weather. I’ll post more on that as it gets closer.

Solar Weather - AR960
These days while we’re anxiously awaiting the arrival of the solar maximum, here at around 2011, things can get pretty boring. Then, every once in a while, we get a nice surprise, kind of like AR960. This bad boy was birthed as AR955 on the previous rotation and didn’t amount to much at all. Then, as it was coming around the bend again it let us know it was there by giving off a few C-class flares. Since then it has produced 8 M-class flares with the strongest between M7 and M9 (the actual measure depends on who you listen to), but has been quite in the last 24 hours. As stated in the weekly SIDC bulletin:

Solar activity was dominated by an outburst of solar flares of C and M-class levels. This activity started on May 30th with a C2.2 flare, originating from a region still behind the east solar limb. It was probably partially occulted at that time. This region, numbered by NOAA as AR0960, produced from June 1st to June 3rd 8 M-class flares, the most energetic one beeing a M7 flare, peaking at 02:12 UT on June 3rd. This active region had on June 3rd a beta-gamma-delta magnetic configuration suggesting a strong potential for new M flares and possibly major flares activity.

I’m going out on a limb but I wouldn’t doubt we get an X-class flare out of this region soon; the lull before the storm if you will. One thing that’s been lacking in all of these flares is a strong proton burst and CMEs, so while the group is quite active, it so far has/will not yield any good chances for aurora. I’ll keeping close on this bugger till is falls off the limb, at which time, we should be seeing the return of AR956 from the previous rotation.

You can get close up images of AR960 like these at the SolarMonitor at http://www.solarmonitor.org/.

For a list and imagery of recent flares, check out the LMSAL SolarSoft page.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 @ 11:09 am on the category Weather, Sun Solar Helio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.