IEM Daily Feature
Wednesday, 24 May 2017

Cold Air Above Us

Posted: 24 May 2017 05:33 AM

Tuesday was a return to chilly weather that has plagued our recent stretch of weather. Even with these chilly temperatures, convective clouds were able to form and bring brief shots of rain to the state and even a few reports of funnel clouds. The reason is that the air above us was relatively cool as well, so any bit of heating that the sunshine was able to produce resulted in rising parcels quickly reaching their lifted condensation levels and forming clouds. This rapid vertical motion with low cloud bases also promotes funnel clouds. Anyway, the featured plot shows mandatory sounding level temperature percentiles for the sounding Tuesday evening from Omaha. The lower atmosphere profile is dominated by cold percentiles around 10% and less. Interestingly, this reverses at levels above the tropopause.

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Tags:   sounding