Kyle's Weather School...the "Warm Finger of Misery!"

Hello this is Junior Meteorologist Kyle Elliott with a new "school" I'm starting. This is my "weather school" for ya'll in order to help you better understand some meteorological concepts that you might hear on the Weather Channel, you local weather news, etc. I will try to post a new topic every day...and if I fail to do this, I'll try every week for a new topic. Also, feel free to message me asking me any questions relating to the topic of the day or our upcoming weather over the next two weeks. If you have an event planned or anything like that, feel free to ask me what the weather will be like that day, and I'll give you my best guess!

Anyway, I guess I'll start this "school" out by posting my first thought provoking and forecast-challenging "lesson"...that of the “Warm Finger of Misery”...or in other words, warm air loft! I’m sure most of you have heard of the concept of “warm air aloft” before, but do you really know how mid-level warming occurs or what happens during this phenomenon? Well, complicated as this topic may seem, it really is not that difficult to understand. Warm air aloft basically occurs when a flow of upper-level warm air streams into a region on the wings of some type of southerly or easterly wind. To get warming aloft, the wind must be coming from a warmer body of land and/or water...to illustrate this point, take the I-95 corridor during winter storms. Normally, precipitation in a winter storm starts out as snow in the I-95 corridor before “mysteriously” turning over to a wintry mess of sleet, freezing rain, and just plain rain. Why, you may ask, does this occur? Well the answer is normally the infamous warm air aloft. When storms churn up the coast, the flow around the north and west side of them is normally out of the ENE to SSE. Due to this wind direction, warming aloft comes in from the Atlantic on the heels of these winds, causing precipitation to change over to a wintry mixture. Also, this same warming aloft can transfer to the surface if enough warm air is pulled in from the warmer body of land and/or water. This is why in the winter that so many times folks in the I-95 corridor see a wintry mix instead of snow, and people just inland from them see all snow. And, as you might have guessed, this is the result of warm air aloft: the changing over from all snow to a wintry mixture of precipitation and sometimes all rain. The reason I call this warming the “Warm Finger of Misery” is because so many snow-lovers in the I-95 corridor have their hopes of a major snowfall crushed due to this nasty warming aloft. Whereas one would hope to see a foot or more of snow out of a snowstorm, for instance, all that falls is 2-3 inches because warm air aloft has come in and crushed all chances for the snowflake to remain intact in its journey down to the surface. So basically, for snow-lovers, the “Warm Finger of Misery” is something that you never want to see...but for snow-haters, the “Warm Finger of Misery” is something that you should hope for. Personally, I hate sleet and freezing rain (caused by warming aloft and surface cold air) and love snow...so I root against warming aloft coming into my area during a snowstorm...but most of the time, my hopes are crushed as I am only about 50 miles north of the I-95 corridor. But what can you do...that’s the way of the weather I guess. Anyway, that’s about all I have to teach ya’ll about the “Warm Finger of Misery,” so hope ya’ll were able to better understand this concept and I will talk to ya’ll tomorrow in my daily weather pattern discussion! If you have any further questions on this lesson or would like to know my forecast for the weather in your area of the country for any day in the next two weeks, please, feel free to e-mail me at akstormtracker17@yahoo.com or kyleae@earthlink.net! This has been Junior Meteorologist (Storm Tracker) Kyle Elliott with a “lesson” in weather!