Re: weather report and sites

Posted by Bret B on December 27, 2013, 12:23 pm, in reply to "weather"
201.138.183.55

Hi Tim, sorry for the late post regarding the wet weather we're having. Better late than never! You can see my favorite links below. This morning around 3AM we had a very summertime-like series of thunderstorms with periods of heavy rain and some thunder and lightning. The rain still continues off and on this morning. I know everyone is interested in the rainfall amount, but my rain gauge is dead and I didn't get a good old reliable jelly jar out until this morning. Did anyone else capture the rain total until about 11:00 this morning? Mea culpa! If I had to guess, I'd say we had between 1-2 inches so far. I might have been more prepared if I had more warning, but my usual weather info sites didn't predict this kind of rain. I think this morning's steady rain is coming from low-level clouds that down't show up well on the various satellite sensors. Rain like this is not unkown in December. In Dec 2009 we had almost 3" of rain, and last year we had almost 2" spread across New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Here are some of the sites I check every day during the rainy season: GOES-West infrared satellite loop: http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/epac/flash-avn.html . The brighter colors mean higher convective cloud tops, which normally means thunderstorms and rain. Right now we only have very light colors overhead which tells me this rain is coming out of lower-level (warmer) clouds. Normally we would not get rain from these lighter colors. TRMM radar satellite: http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov/publications_dir/regional_americas.html . This is our only rainfall-detecting radar resource, since the nearest Mexican weather radar site (near Cuyutlan) has been down for years now. However, the TRMM is a low-orbiting satellite which only passes over us every few hours, so this data isn't realtime. It just now updated its latest 3-hour data set and now shows the rain we got in the last few hours. Weather Underground forecast for La Manzanilla: http://www.wunderground.com/q/locid:MX077060 . They must do some interpolation to generate this forecast because the nearest official weather station is at the Manzanillo airport. They forecast quite different chances of rain today for Manzanillo city (40% chance of rain today) vs. Barra de Navidad (60%) vs, La Manzanilla (20%). I can't believe they have computer models that can accurately distinguish between these 3 locations so close together, so use a large grain of salt with these forecasts. Mexican weather agancy forecast (in Spanish): http://smn.cna.gob.mx/boletin/discusion/discusion.html . Nice weather charts, but this product only comes out once per day at 3PM. Yesterday they mentioned the influx of humid Pacific air across the middle of the country, and called for 80% chance of rain somewhere in Jalisco. So you can see that we don't have the selection of high resolution and timely weather forecast products that you may be used to in the US and Canada. Anyone else have any good sites?

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