Basic Skew-T Analysis: Snow Or No Snow?
It’s been a long time since we’ve posted some new content to the site, but in honor of Leap Day, let’s leap across the country to do some real basic Skew-T analysis in central California to check out the chance for snowfall later this morning. Note first that elevation plays a huge role in the type of precipitation for the region we’re taking a look at today. The point that I had my Skew-Ts centered around is located at an elevation of approximately 2100 feet ASL. Go a few hundred feet up in elevation, and it’ll most certainly be cold enough for snow to fall, at least in the layer directly above the surface. Go down several hundred feet and snow is much less likely to occur. As we’ll soon see, there are some very interesting divergences in the models we’re looking at here. What we’re going to be focusing on primarily in this post is reading part of the Skew-T Log-p diagram to determine (or at least take a stab at) precipitation type. The “Skew-T” diagram is one of the most useful, but rather intimidating tools in meteorology (it’s basically...
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