Chris in Trouble; Heat Continues

Video still on hold this morning as the software arrived very late yesteday afternoon and I did not have enough time to get it loaded. Will try my best to get it installed and working for the afternoon version which may be just a bit late due to early afternoon activities.

Well, yesterday at this time we were looking for the first hurricane of the season but Chris has encountered some stronger than expected shear and he is in trouble. Visible satellite imagery showed the low level circulation of Chris to be completely detached from the deep convection located well south and southeast of that low level circulation. Chris is being maintained as a minimal tropical storm which is somewhat generous. Besides the decrease in strength, Chris took a slight turn to a more westerly course late yesterday. The result is that the future track of Chris has been shifted south of the previous tracks. Big question is whether Chris will even be able to survive. The shear is expected to slack off a bit in the area ahead of Chris, so stay tuned for the latest developments.

Elsewhere in the tropics there is little of concern. An area of disturbed weather stretched from south of the Cayman Islands across Cuba to the southern Bahamas, but there was no sign of any development in that area.

For Alabama and much of the Southeast US, our weather pattern is showing very little signs of change. The ridge aloft keeps a strong hold on the upper level pattern with surface high pressure nosing across the Southeast from the Atlantic. The upper level ridge changes little into the weekend and then strengthens on Monday. So for the next week or so there does not appear to be any reason to change the forecast of hot temperatures and isolated afternoon thunderstorms. Moring lows will be in the middle 70s while the afternoon highs will continue to reach the mid and upper 90s.

Remembering back to our last big heat wave, the summer of 1980, it's important to take the heat seriously. Be sure to drink lots of water and take frequent breaks if you are engaged in strenuous activities outside. Also be sure to check on elderly friends or relatives to make sure they are okay.

The video is available via iTunes.

Stay cool. More this afternoon.

-Brian-
Posted by  
on August 3, 2006, 6:34 am
Well I'm glad that Chris is in trouble I said yesterday that I thought the big high would keep him away and it looks like I'm right. Now I know the storm could get strong again but it looks like he will stay far away from us. :)

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Posted by bebes  
on August 3, 2006, 8:08 am
Off the subject, but the movie Twister has been on TV alot lately. I always ask myself "did they even bother to consult a meteorologist for this movie?" Besides predicting weather by dropping dirt from their hands, they rank tornadoes as F 4 or F 5 as they are forming. It is my understanding that those rankings aren't possible until the damage path is observed and studied extensively. Just wondered what the staff's thoughts on the movie were.

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Posted by bamasooner  
on August 3, 2006, 9:28 am
As a matter of fact, the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma (the greatest meteorological school in the world, bar none) served as consultants for this movie. Much of it was filmed around the OU campus. However, the directors did have to take some "artistic liscence" with the movie in order to make it interesting. In order to compensate for having to classify the tornadoes in advance, they made the damage in the aftermath match the damage that a tornado in that category would actually cause.

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Posted by  
on August 3, 2006, 10:23 am
And just to clarify..... the "dirt thing" was the character checking out the wind direction at the surface...... looking at strong inflow into the storm.... :-p

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Posted by   www
on August 3, 2006, 12:10 pm
I had to laugh when I saw Bebe's post. I watched Twister a week or so ago after years of not having seen it, and wondered the same thing-(Not about the dirt but the classifications of the tornados cast in the movie)
Bamasooner's explaination makes sense, and this is still a fun movie to see, even though not always accurate!!

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