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Posted by Ray
on 5/11/2012, 6:38 am
74.65.47.166
....should be extended to today, which will be a super soaring day, as club cognoscenti already know and should already be planning for...flying! Will be amazed if none of the weekday fliers aren't down there today. Yesterday, the beautifully unstable boundary layer was already evident, cloud streets from Canada to PA...overdeveloped around Rochester but fine further south. That cold advection is continuing today, with the wind vector veering with altitude (300,310,340 at 3,6,9 K), and increasing modestly (20,25,39) as you go up, which is what you want, 'cause if there's too abrupt an increase (to much shear), even strong thermals can get ripped up. Last night's sounding is pretty amazing:
http://www.atmos.albany.edu/gopher-local/sounding/BUF-120511-00Z.gif
If you need help interpreting, call David. In short: a perfect dry adiabatic sounding up to 850 mb. Now usually, after a good day of PBL mixing, the adiabatic part of the sounding hits a marked inversion. Sometimes but not often though, instead of that, the slope (dT/dZ, where Z is height) just gradually gets less and less adiabatic, i.e. gradually gets less "steep". Why? Someone is welcome to post the answer, otherwise I will, when I update the forecast for Sunday, which will be needed.
So today will be the best soaring day by far for the next three. According to the sounding, what should the CCL be? Extending the dry adiabat up to where it hits the dewpoint, we get...500mb! Well this ain't Montana folks, and we ain't gonna get 18,000 foot cloud bases. Remember that the Buffalo sounding last night won't reflect the additional moisture steaming up from Lake O during today...so we should see some cu, especially in the southern tier...but they will be high, at least 7K, maybe increasing to 9 or even 10 K as you get into PA. Should be some great flights from HH today.
Saturday: we start to get warm advection...not strong, but enough to weaken conditions, and maybe some cirrus in the afternoon to add more dampening. Ridge may work somewhat, should kick off thermals by noon. Decent day, anyone getting > 3 hours gets a six pack.
Sunday: well all week the TV tells us Mom's Day may have a few showers. Maybe not. The 500 mb flow goes zonal, with weak, epheremal, and hard to model accurately short waves passing thru. The latest GFS and NGM 60 hr 500mb vorticity maps agree amazingly well: they both show vorticity swaths passing to the north and south of NY state, leaving us in the middle...which is good. So weak fronts coming thru will be both moisture and energy starved, as far as being able to generate any significant rain. Could be rain free and decent all day...stay tuned.
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