Wednesday, January 21, 2009

One Hundred Eight Degrees

HEATWAVE!


... okay, so maybe not that type of heat wave, but it was very, very warm here along the Front Range today. Temperatures had been slowly climbing day after day for the past few. The air mass, not moving much in that time period, had only a limited amount of moisture work with. With continued downsloping winds heating the air, the moisture mixed out until it was bone dry.

Well, this trend continued into today. It was easy to see from the sounding the sounding this morning that temperatures would easily climb above 20ºC. And, well, today didn't disappoint. Sounds like it's time for a ... temperature roundup!

Let's start with official reporting stations!
72º KBJC - Broomfield/Jeffco (now Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport)
71º KDEN - Denver International Airport (official records taken for Denver here)
70º KBKF - Buckley Air National Guard Base
69º KAPA - Centennial Airport

UDFCD Mesonet stations:
77º - Diamond Hill (Downtown Denver)
74º - Brighton
73º - Castle Rock
73º - Highlands Ranch
73º - Quincy Reservoir
72º - Urban Farm (Stapleton)
71º - Aurora Town Hall
70º - Aurora Reservoir
70º - Pump Station 3 (Aurora)
69º - Brighton North
68º - Louisville

The 71ºF at DIA marks a record high temperature for this day.

Did I say dry? Check out this METAR from KBJC earlier today:

KBJC 212055Z 06022G37KT 70SM FEW200 22/M38 A3001 =

Okay, so that's 22C/-38C which gives us a 108ºF dewpoint depression. I guess you take an atmosphere with 4% humidity and push 20kt downslope into it, and suddenly you're down to 1%RH. We spoke about a 96ºF Td depression a month or two ago. Even that was amazing. I really don't know what to say know. All I know is my skin itches, and my eyes and nostrils are on fire.

I've been pretty weatharoused all day long needless to say. And the sunset, oh! ... the sunset. I haven't even had time to look at my photos yet. No time tonight, I guess. Though dry, we did get some mid-level moisture late and a beautiful wave cloud set up. I'll try and include those soon.

Things have calmed down significantly in the tropics. I haven't been able to find any good reports from the impact of Fanele, but found this beautiful image of Fanele before she made landfall yesterday:


Image from Nasa's Earth Observatory.


Currently:

09S Fanele - The storm has emerged on the southeast coast of Madagascar and will continue to weaken as it moves to the south and east.






There are a couple other ares of interest at the moment, but really nothing too interesting.

Satellite imagery used with permission; courtesy of IPS Meteostar Inc. Click for larger images. Annotations are made by the author of this blog. Tropical cyclone tracking information from Navy/NRL Tropical Cyclone Page.

NOTE: If you've reached this page due to a search result, the most current tropical information can be found in the latest post and not necessarily the post you are reading. Visit http://blog.bigskyconvection.com/ for the most recent post.


Dann.
Currently at Denver (Hampden Heights), Colorado: 41ºF BKN (high)

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