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Storm Impacting the Northwest U.S.; Fire Weather Conditions in Southern California; Severe Weather in the South

A Pacific storm is bringing areas of low elevation rain, moderate to heavy mountain snow, and high winds to the Northwest. Strong Santa Ana winds and very dry conditions are producing elevated to critical fire weather conditions in southern California. Isolated strong to severe thunderstorms are possible through early Wednesday morning across parts of northeast Texas into western Tennessee. Read More >

First CG Lightning Convective Environment Browser


This study focused on the NWS Tampa Bay County Warning Area.

NOAA RAP model analysis data was used to partition events into nine NWS Tampa Bay flow regimes (below left) based on 1200 UTC mean vector wind in the red box on the below right image. These regimes were the same ones used to create the Florida Summer Thunderstorm Climatology web pages.

First Cloud-to-Ground (CG) and non-CG (null) events were identified for May-September (2012-2021) using USPLN lightning data between 1200 and 2359Z.

Composite soundings display the mean and 25th/75th percentile vertical temperature and dewpoint profiles and composite mean convective parameters for first CG events in each regime one hour before a first CG event and at 1800 UTC for non-CG (null) events.

Environmental parameter distributions use box-and-whisker plot approach for first CG events at -1 h and non-CG events at 1200 and 1800 UTC
 
Flow Regimes
Flow Regimes
Analysis Box
Regime Analysis Box

All images on this page can be magnified by clicking, and resized back to original size with a second click.