One of the defining characteristics of spring in the upper midwest is a land surface that warms up much more quickly than the many lakes do. There’s a couple of reasons for this: water itself has a higher heat capacity than soil does, sun penetrates into the lakes somewhat which... Read More
A partial overlap of two GOES-19 (GOES-East) Mesoscale Domain Sectors provided 30-second Visible images (above) and Infrared images (below) — showing severe thunderstorms that produced two isolated tornadoes, hail as large as 4.00 inches in diameter, and wind gusts to 60 mph (SPC Storm Reports) in the St. Louis, Missouri area on 27 April 2026. These particular events occurred within... Read More
1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Visible images (above) showed fog/stratus that was moving southward across the far southern part of Lake Michigan on 25 April 2026. Plots of METAR surface observations highlighted how areas near the coast — where a lake breeze advected the fog/stratus inland — stayed significantly cooler (temperatures in... Read More
In the afternoon and evening of 23 April 2026, numerous tornadoes touched down across the Great Plains of the continental United States. The storm reports gathered by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center show a line of tornadoes extending from central Iowa down to north central Oklahoma, accompanied by numerous reports of large hail... Read More
