re: Severe Weather Moving East Today

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How crazy is this front?

Thundering outside and watching Tulsa weather and their storm chasers...Phone goes off “Winter Weather Advisory” as its 64 or so outside right now.

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Not terribly crazy, especially in the heart of winter as well. That's one of the dichotomies in the atmosphere fueling the action.

Quite often you can get a big temp swing such as 30 degrees in the matter of an hour or two. Thus a severe event can turn winter like very rapidly as you are seeing where you are.

Looks like after this burst of heavy rain and lightning we will be clear in Northwest Arkansas.

Doesn’t look like it’s making much progress east. Was this expected?

Yes.

Man I wish I could just look up at some clouds and tell you everything about it like Reed can

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Man I wish I could just look up at some clouds and tell you everything about it like Reed can.

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All you have to do is put in a few thousand hours looking at storms.

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Thanks for the eli5 explanation! I understood that.

Thanks to the other poster for their response too.

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No problem. Here is the 700 mb flow (700mb is an atmospheric height - the lower the number, the higher into the atmosphere you typically are).



You can see the wind barbs out of the SW in Eastern TX and out of the N in New Mexico.

That's the dip in the 700mb jet stream.

At 850mb, closer to earth, you can see the low a bit easier.



Having a big L helps, but you can see counterclockwise flow around the L. In all areas except the immediate north.

Tornados happen because these flows aren't all aligned at different levels of the atmosphere, which gets wind rotating, and ultimately it may reach the ground.

Look at this sounding:



Look at the wind barbs on the right hand side. As you go up the chart - higher into the atmosphere - the barbs change from SSE winds at the surface (the moist air flowing into NE Texas at the moment), to due S winds, then SSW, and ultimately WSW winds in the upper atmosphere. Those upper winds steer the storms, and the lower winds feed it the energy.

ETA - not always steered at the upper level, but the upper level winds are usually stronger, so the storms typically move along where the mean wind direction is at all levels. In this case, the mean direction is moving to the NE.

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Doesn’t look like it’s making much progress east. Was this expected?

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Looks like it's right about where the models said it would be 8 hours ago. Don't think anything has really changed for timing.

5 pm CST: not seeing more than 28-31 Knot gusts from observations around KAUS to KDAL and DFW.

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Not terribly crazy, especially in the heart of winter as well. That's one of the dichotomies in the atmosphere fueling the action.

Quite often you can get a big temp swing such as 30 degrees in the matter of an hour or two. Thus a severe event can turn winter like very rapidly as you are seeing where you are.

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There is no crazy here weather wise. The unexpected is normal. It is definitely a first for me though, hearing thunder and watching storms all around us while also getting a winter advisory alert from weather radio.

We have temp swings often...but this event has been crazy to be involved in.