IEM Daily Feature
Tuesday, 02 July 2019
Tuesday, 02 July 2019
Calm Aloft
Posted: 02 Jul 2019 09:34 PM
With all the heat and humidity around recently and given that thunderstorms feed on such
reservoirs, one may wonder why the storms on Tuesday weren't very severe. Besides the
lack of any defined surface front to help focus thunderstorm development, another limiting
factor was weak winds aloft. The featured chart depicts July sounding level percentiles of
wind speed for Omaha based on the morning sounding on Tuesday. Winds aloft were
generally very light and even below the 5th percentile at 250 and 200 mb. Severe
Thunderstorms generally need stronger winds aloft to help segregate an updraft and
downdraft within the storm. With weak winds, storms tend to pulse with the downdraft
disrupting the updraft.
Voting:
Good = 18
Bad = 1
Tags: sounding
Voting:
Good = 18
Bad = 1
Tags: sounding