Time For Atlantic To "Wake" UpAdded : Monday at 11:16 Last week we were covering the run up to Christmas and mentioned the troublesome wake across the Atlantic and how it plays havoc with numerical weather models.
If we take a look at the chart for tomorrow :-
The area of interest is this huge cold pool of air across the Northern Atlantic which is brought Southwards in the wake of the area of low pressure over Iceland.
Cold air, warm ocean surface temperature means a huge amount of latent energy which is converted into showers and more organised troughs way out to sea.
This is important, as how these showers organise themselves and develop has much larger knock on effects further down the line as it allows the residual energy to be picked up by more organised systems coming in from the West.
If you take a look at the precipitation forecast for the same time :-
You can see how the showers are modeled by the GFS. Meteorologists are constantly looking at the transfer of energy within these systems and whether they have the potential to turn into more organised low pressure areas (which we call secondary lows) as the colder air interacts with the milder ocean surface.
Thursday sees such a development :-
As the trailing frontal system clears the Southeast we see a wave depression develop on the front bringing heavy rain back in from the Southeast.
This is because the jet stream runs in from the Southwest and reinvigorates the frontal system :-
The message is not to get too hung up on the finer details at the moment. The cold wake out across the Atlantic will allow colder air to filter South. This in turn develops heavy, thundery showers out in the Atlantic which in turn provides plenty of residual energy out West for low pressure areas rattling in later this week.
METEOROLOGIST : MARSH |