weatherdude1108 wrote:You know those contrails in the sky that are left by airplanes as they fly at high altitudes? Went out to let dog outside. Looked up at the full moon, and noticed a set of two contrails that were paralleling each other. I followed those and saw another set of two contrails crisscrossing the original set of two contrails, not quite at 90 degrees. My camera picked up the moon, but could not pick up the contrails. Were they four separate planes flying in pairs? Atmospheric testing? Very PECULIAR(??). Didn't know if anyone on this board has any insight into contrailing(?).
Did you see how long those streaks lasted in the sky for? I think we all are thinking the same thing, that's not contrails but something else that has the same suffix but different prefix
.
wxman57 wrote:My thoughts? I've had enough winter now. Dreaming of 90F warmth and long summer bike rides.
However, I don't expect any 90F temps over the next few weeks. Next week's storm system has a good chance of dropping more snow on north Texas around next Wednesday. However, the 12z GFS has a much weaker trof axis than earlier runs. I suspect it is in error. The southern stream should remain active for the next few weeks, bringing additional bouts of snow to TX (north TX, not SE TX). Wouldn't be surprised to see snow as far south as Waco in the next few weeks. Don't see any indication of extreme cold across TX (no, I don't mean below 80, I mean low 20s or colder in Houston, for example). It'll be just cold enough to be miserable to me without the joy of any near-80F days.
As usual, I agree with your thoughts on this pattern during winter. I'm done with this cold, it reminds me of how much more I enjoy warm and hot weather...freedom. I enjoy snowstorms and snow as much as the next person, but when it ends and there isn't anything in the pipeline that is interesting, its horrible. I usually do not follow the weather at all during these periods, not even outside my region. You have very short days, non-stop overcast skies which no one else here knows what that's like for over 3 weeks straight without break (its very bad), a dry cold airmass that causes no entertainment value and dries out your skin, and white light frequencies (sun reflecting off of snow cover when it is sunny) that emits negative brain patterns that causes Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in quite a number of people. Texas doesn't have as many of these problems as we do in the Great Lakes area but wxman57 would be even more miserable here...a lot more!
Comanche wrote:Not sure if you guys have seen this or not. I feel this is as good an explanation of the GFS vs. Euro as you will get...
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/12/r ... rvice.html"...The National Weather Service efforts in global and national prediction are being undermined by lack of computer power. This is not just my opinion--ask leaders inside the weather service, National Academy committees, or knowledgeable folks in the field and they will tell you the same thing. Why are ECMWF's forecasts so much better than the NWS's? A big part of it is that ECMWF has the computer power to run their high-resolution global forecast at 16 km resolution, while ours is 25 km, their ensemble forecasting system has twice the resolution, and they can use an advanced data assimilation approach (4DVAR) that requires a lot of computer resources.
Consider the difference in the computer resources available to ECMWF versus the National Weather Service's Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), and keep in mind that EMC has a much wider range of responsibility (includes high resolution national and regional forecasting) than ECMWF (which does only global forecasting).
ECMWF has two machines, each with 24546 cores and a computational ability of .75 petaflops (thousand trillion floating point operations per second). These machines are #37 and 38 on the worldwide list of top 500 computers. The National Weather Service has two computers that are not even on the top 500 list. Each has 4992 processors and an ability to do .07 petaflops. You see the problem? The NWS has less than 10% of the computer power as ECMWF and has many more responsibilities..."
Wow, great information here and some questions answered, this explains why Euro is King and the GFS is not...major computing power difference! I had no idea that gap was that huge...I'm surprised the GFS is even comparable with that. If its lack of CPU power, why isn't this being addressed? Unbelievable. If it were up to me I'd put these models on the most powerful super computers on earth and see how it improves. I'm sure it would be a decreasing rate of return for set number of cores added but its weather and any improvement is big.
And that leads me to another quandary, how can the NWS's weather super computer(s) not even break the top 500 mark? That's ridiculous. I would have never believed that and still don't. Here's why: when you read what the most powerful computers or fastest do in general I often read tasks such as nuclear stockpile degradation simulations, missile projection systems, protein folding, DNA decoding, global warming simulations, and
weather. We're talking about tasks that are done on the most powerful like top 10, not #37 or below #500!!!!!!
The posts in this forum are NOT official forecast and should not be used as such. They are just the opinion of the poster and may or may not be backed by sound meteorological data. They are NOT endorsed by any professional institution or 
! Major mid winter warming event top down it shows in the stratosphere. Effectively it will translate more towards late January and February though, as there will be a quiet period middle of the month while the warming takes time. I was going to wait and post it for the January outlook but you beat me to the punch giving hints 
The snow storm they just had beat the previous historical record pictured above.
(I thought I had you hanging upside down in one of our frozen sloughs)