Tuesday, November 9, 2010

SOLPEX IOP2: Dangers of CW revealed

http://www.zazzle.com
Some reflections on IOP2 and forecasting lake-effect.  One of the more intriguing aspects of the event is the early development of a wind-parallel band over the SW corner of the lake.  This band trained into the northeast corner of Tooele Valley.

With flow out of the NW, most of us think about Salt Lake County being in the DLE cross hairs, but in this instance, the band initiated so far west that it impacted Tooele County.  Why there instead of near the mid-lake axis remains to be seen, but we can add the location of band initiation to the list of issues limiting our ability to forecast lake-effect location.

Further, NW flow is supposed to be good for the Cottonwood Canyons, but CLN has only received about 0.23" of SWE since midnight, which is barely a dusting by their standards.  I suspect that the SWE near campus was equal or greater than that (note that I don't trust the 0.06" reported by WBB).

Conventional wisdom can only get you so far with non-linear lake-land-atmosphere interactions.

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