weather blog site: 3 Swirls

[Mon. Nov. 10 note: There was a technical glitch which delayed this Sat. Nov. 8 entry being pushed to the site until today; here is the original post followed by an update.]

More on those swirls in a moment ...

I'm in New York City for the birthday party tonight of a friend from high school, Wayne Glaubinger. The hotel at which I'm staying is around the corner from Wall Street. While standing on Wall Street last night as I embarked on a walk to Greenwich Village, I saw this:

It served as a reminder that although there's been a lot of criticism lately of some people involved in some things here, Wall Street is every bit as much a part of this great country as is small-town Main Street and everything in between. As I was also reminded a few minutes later, this is also very close to the site of the World Trade Center.

After a moment of reflection there, I proceeded on to Greenwich Village, which was a trip down memory lane. I used to frequently go to concerts there in the 1970s and '80s -- everything from a 2am James Brown club show to my "15 minutes" of a brush with (sitting two tables away from) Andy Warhol at a Lou Reed concert. Ahh, the good ol' days!

Unlike James' cold sweat, I was dripping with hot sweat by the time I got to Bleecker Street, thanks to a stagnant, very warm & humid night for November. Friday's low temperature was 58 degrees, higher than the "normal" high. During the approach to Newark Airport the plane spectacularly glided through clear air with a sun low in the sky glinting on a sea of stratus clouds below. They were on the northwest edge of swirl #1:

That was the remnant of the coastal storm which brought wind and rain to the East Coast this week. The warmth I experienced has been even more noteworthy elsewhere in the central and eastern U.S. In fact, check this out:

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE LA CROSSE WI
420 PM CDT WED NOV 5 2008

...WARMEST STRETCH OF DAYS THIS LATE IN THE YEAR IN ROCHESTER MN...

FROM OCTOBER 30TH THROUGH NOVEMBER 4TH...ROCHESTER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT HAD AN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE OF 57.2 DEGREES. THIS WAS THE WARMEST STRETCH OF DAYS EVER RECORDED THIS LATE IN THE YEAR.

A contributing factor was another one of those episodes of higher-than-average pressure aloft which I've talked a lot about, vis-a-vis the irony that not only can there be anomalous snowstorms in the midst of global warming, the latter can actually help cause the former. Speaking of which ...

Swirl #2 (another satellite image from Friday) was the remnant of the phenomenal blizzard which hit the Dakotas and thereabouts.

Keep in mind that the totals below represent only the amount of snowfall and not the effect of powerful winds blowing the accumulations into huge drifts.

Per this data from the National Weather Service, 9" in one day in Rapid City was the largest single-day snowfall on record so early in the season.

And last but not least is Hurricane Paloma, which is about to make landfall in Cuba, a country for which this hurricane season has already been a rough one. This is a stunning satellite image of Paloma courtesy of the University of Wisconsin CIMSS:

In the historical record, Paloma is only exceeded by Hurricane Lenny in 1999 for being so strong so late in the season, and as this NOAA map indicates there have been only four Category 4s in November in the historical record.

It is following a track and intensity similar to that of the November hurricane in 1932; here is an excerpt from the official article on the 1932 season:

Paloma will not only weaken due to its interaction with land, but then strong upper-level winds (the bright colors) as depicted in this model forecast below are expected to discombobulate the circulation, but not before the hurricane caps a wild week of weather ... which follows other recent wildness.

[Image source: Wright-Weather, LLC]