A new time lapse video is up on youtube covering a week-long weather pattern in the southeastern section of the country that resulted in several derechos. The storn on the 8th of May has been called an “inland hurricane”. There was a lot of damage over a wide area and a few deaths. While not a tropical event like a real hurricane, it did have the winds and, apparently, some structural features of a small category I hurricane. The National Weather Service office in St. Louis has a page about the event, and Stu Ostro, a meteorologist at Weather.com, has a good blog post about it.
What prompted me to make this video so long after the fact was a visit to Johnson’s Shut-ins State Park in Missouri. I drove in from the south, through Lesterville. That area was hit by a microburst with winds of 100+ mph (161 km/h). The National Weather Service in St. Louis says that in the affected forests up to 80% of the trees were felled. The drive through that forest along Hwy N south of the park is amazing and sad. The area right around the most visited portion of the park was fortunately spared from the most damaging winds.
The only radar archive I have of this event that I can share is of radar-only transparent GIFs from the NWS, and for some reason I’m having trouble compositing those onto a white map. I have a script from my Blue Marble experiments that successfully composits them on a projected portion of that image, so that’s what I made the time lapse from. It doesn’t really affect what you can see from a weather perspective, but the ground clutter blotches are even more annoying against a darker background.
Update 8-Sept-09: I have reprocessed all the radar frames to minimize the noise from ground clutter. The new, improved video is what is embedded in this article now. The original is here on YouTube.
