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phdhorn

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Posts posted by phdhorn

  1. Could be a bumpy ride today, NWS has us at a Level 3 (enhanced) risk for severe weather, not all that common even for us in the spring. Most likely concern will be large hail and winds (tornadoes maybe just a quick bit at first, but as the cells merge they'll form a line which knocks out most tornadic development. Could be a ROFLBOX bonanza as I think there is a pretty good chance of 3-4 areas of damaging hail at a given point in the region. Storms might move slow, which wouldn't help (but usually storms with big winds move fast, we'll see). Keep in mind that even with severe weather, it usually affects a relatively small portion of the area, so we're all not gonna die today (probably, maybe, well I dunno).

    Big Boom storms will form/go by mid afternoon to maybe dinnertime, then (hopefully) "just" moderate, even rain over most of the area.

    Keep an eye on your favorite weather honk after lunch, and have a plan to get your car outta harm's way. I'll come back and post if we have van-sized hailstones or something like that (something worth posting about). I'll keep peeking at the radar after lunch but these things as you know can flare up outta nothing.

     

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  2. Yes, I should have known (SIAP blah blah). All I can say is if it's posted here before this (haven't checked) it did come from the source I said - probably got out there anyway (the internet (like Surlians) these days it's all over the place (Norm McDonald).

    Anyway, I got it through texts of friends who know the homeowner. If it's a member here, sorry if you got any serious damage, hope all is well. 

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  3. Final Crisis Weather Report:

    - Roads 8:30 21st ATX: Highways - great; Medium roads (main roads with lights)- not super; Residential streets - good until snow gets packed into slip/ice-- don't drive if you're not used to it until after lunch (treatments/some melting)
    - Sun will come out today... when? Depends on speed of system moving out. Best bets are for maybe 3-4 p.m. so not a lot of solar melting. Temps expected to > about 2 but could easily stay below freezing if no sun. Roads should be good though later.
    - Models did very well on this (they're getting better), almost exactly bullseye for Central/East/SE Texas. Called it very well with amounts, locations, including bullseye for Houston/SW LA.
    - Clearup-melting by later tomorrow afternoon it'll be gone. For today, travel not recommended until mid-late afternoon for most non-residential streets. 
    - Temps tomorrow get into the 40's again, so that'll be it for this one.

    See you next crisis!

     

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  4. Quick update (not much changed from my orig. post) for ATX:

    The precip from this storm is coming from one which didn't exist as of yesterday - that is, the low has been developing the past few hours (as forecast). When this happens, it's always a little bit of a dice throw as to how strong it is but especially where exactly the "worst" of it (in this case ice/freez. rain esp.). Models have been pretty consistent the past 3-4 days but a slight trend upward up to our area (they've been consistent on Houston and the coast, which will get the brunt of this it now looks pretty certain, esp. up towards Beaumont and into LA). Target is the lower LA area, that'll be the most totals (up to 9" in or near NOLA).

    So for ATX, anywhere from a dusting (western side) to a few inches (Metro → eastern) with totals increasing as you drive SE. But the good thing about this storm is that it's farily non-disruptive; that is, it's going to begin in earnest about dinnertime (after rush) and at its peak midnight→5 a.m. or so. Morning rush will probably be a little rough (as I said Sat.) but roads should be cleared up more or less by evening rush - temps won't get much above freezing in ATX but they will get that way, and clouds should move out Tues. afternoon and the sun will work it. So no big deal or at least a smaller deal than easily could have been. ATX is on the NW flank of this thing and since it'll be moving NE even as it fills in, the precip amt. for us is still on the lighter side (not so the coast) but it'll be moving away as it develops, so only 6-7 hours of light precip. Meh. Maybe a nice white blanket esp. eastern parts, probably melted by late Wed. Good idea to close schools around here i think, but it could still end up meh. All done by postlunch Wed.

    The only other equation is what about icing? Again, the precip levels are light where we are, so I don't think more than .10 of ice would be around at worst (.25+ starts to matter for weight on trees/lines, etc.). And that's if anywhere near us gets it. My predic is that that very thin and spotted area will be S/SE of us where temps overnight might be closer to freezing and above (all of ATX will be <32° overnight tonight, so snow really is the deal and I don't see any warm pocket of air trying to push up.

    TLDR: Maybe 1-2" for part of ATX (mostly east/northeast of us) beginning Mon evening into overnight, morning rush slippery here/there, all is done by lunch Tues.

    Houston and points east of Austin: more snow but still mainly an overnight deal. Just don't drive, rather pull your car behind you with ropes. So much easier. Good luck we're all counting on you.

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  5. 38 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

    No idea, just what he told me. Not trying to piss on the party. I'm sure if it's good tomorrow they'll roll. This new distributor has been pretty shitty since they bought out the last one.

    Where's @phdhorn when we really need him.l because I don't know shit about fuck.

    Neither do I. I would have said "Travel Wednesday, don't travel Thursday, travel Friday." That's what I would have said if I'd have said it.

    By Friday 10 a.m. or so it'll be a nothingburger, or next to it, especially the roads to Six Flags or wherever the hell they're playing it.

    See you next weather crisis.

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  6. Not much new. Track keeps shifting oh so slightly E/NE - new dip in Jet stream far south will suck it up like a straw, should keep moving fast.. If it does and doesn't slow down in the Gulf (not likely), that'll be good.

    Right now a lot of forces are fighing on it - on one hand warm water and open sea, good for restrengthening. On the other, dry air (from being over land, Beryl's now of course close to the large continental land mass with drier air, and some shear, which leads to continued disorganization.

    NHC thinks though it'll ramp up somewhat quickly very near the TX coast. Still think a 90-100 mph Cat1/2. However if a fast mover as currently, that'll help reduce the damage. Once it gets about = latitude with Houston or just north, it'll zip away when the Jet grabs it, probably 20-30 mph. But yeah there's gonna be some flooding on the coast where flooding is common. But hopefully it'll zip away.

    Austin, too early to tell, max a dousing of 4+ inches mostly central-east. Min nothing and you'll like it. Probably in the middle. Unfortunately little/no lake help

    I'll check back in over next 2 days, if anyone has question or comment. )

    (Sorry hit the wrong durn button 'afore posting, so I added some.

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  7. 26 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

    Dude...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Maria

    Hurricane Maria was a deadly Category 5 hurricane that devastated the northeastern Caribbean in September 2017, particularly in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, which accounted for 2,975 of the 3,059 deaths.[1][2] It is the deadliest and costliest hurricane to strike the island of Puerto Rico, and is the deadliest hurricane to strike the country of Dominica and the territory of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The most intense tropical cyclone worldwide in 2017, Maria was the thirteenth named storm, eighth consecutive hurricane, fourth major hurricane, second Category 5 hurricane, and deadliest storm of the extremely active 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. Maria was the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Mitch in 1998, and the tenth most intense Atlantic hurricane on record. Total monetary losses are estimated at upwards of $91.61 billion (2017 USD), mostly in Puerto Rico, ranking it as the fourth-costliest tropical cyclone on record.

    ... and Maria was retired by the NHC in 2017 specifically because of that storm (look it up, it's on the Internet!).

    They don't always get every common name, but yeah, they definitely try to use uncommon names now.  Not saying everyone walks around traumatized, but yes, definitely, that's why the names are weird or weirdly spelled - to avoid associations with people of those more common names, plus the obvious awkwardness of renaming a storm which has an infamous history. Read this from NHC Page:

    image.png.40bc2f778fa14c928b6d6e6d26eaa995.png

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  8. 11 hours ago, Indomitable said:

    What a dumbass fucking name. I’ve never even heard of someone named Beryl. 

    Hi, a few notions:

    1) They give weird, psychotic names to storms because if a storm is bad and is known for death and destruction, people with that name will always be associated with that storm. Hence, no "Johns", "Helens", "Marias", etc. More like Lothar, Mairyee (i.e. psychotic spellings of common names), etc. They used to give more common names but developed that syndrome, plus bad storms tend to get their names retires, i.e. there won't be a Katrina or Camille ever again. likely.

    2) This one looks to be doing what most do, angle up east of Austin.  Once that high moved off to Florida, I thought it might. 
    3) Rain therefore is impossible to predict because it's impossible to know where the rain bands will fall out, especially on the dry side.
    4) Almost certainly not a lake filler - looks pretty certain that most of the rain will be Coastal Plain into maybe 15 miles west of Austin at most. Of course it could wobble. That's why rain could be next to nothing up to 2-3 inches around ATX. But not widespread, lakes won't see much rise.
    5) Look to Cat 2 (at least) if it jogs north and hits land (say s. of Galveston) relatively later; if it hits sooner (i.e. Corpus or s.) high Cat 1. Warm waters but a little shear in the Gulf, so it's a toss-up but I think it'll easy get to 80-90 again if not hit 100. Remember this thing went from cough cough to Cat 5 in 48 hrs., though under different (i.e. mid-Atlantic) conditions.
    6) Coastal Plain flooding if Beryl slows down, but so far this has been a pretty fast storm and they speed up once on land. If it stalls near the coast could be trouble, but so far it's keeping up speed (moving 12-15 mph now, decently fast for a tropical storm). Houston could see flooding if it jogs more N/NE but again, all depends on strength and speed. Right now I think minor flooding bc of its movement speed.

    Will be back if any concern. For now, not really. 
     

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  9. Well that was fun! The gorgeous blues of a clear sky weren't visible but otherwise pretty cool. That last minute where it gets geometrically darker/faster is still something to behold.  Also cool to compare the two (2017) for me. BTW roosters did start crowing here and birds definitely stopped completely, we were looking for that and got it.

    BTW, this was the one hope I/many others had - a recently-discovered confirmation of a long-believed phenomenon. This article is why the clouds parted enough when it seemed like all hope was lost. A quick and good read.

    https://www.sciencealert.com/clouds-vanish-during-a-solar-eclipse-and-we-finally-know-why

    Talk to you in 300 years when the next one hits ATX!

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  10. 13 hours ago, Born to Run said:

    TLDR

    Spanish oaks?

    Homestead, next door.

    Learned last night that Austin Energy issued an apology to us over the news, neighbor captured screenshot but I haven't seen it yet. I guess that's a start!

  11. One more time.

    Precip over for CenTex, as expected not a big deal. Weather services did really good on this event, which is not easy.

    Travel E of U.S. 77 today dicey - because icy. Take care.

    Finally, a little "glad I'm not that guy" satisfaction by relative position comment.  Yesterday Austin had about 174 customers without power max in the day.

    171 of them were my neighborhood.

    Power went out about 9:45 a.m. Sunday. After the usual AE claptrap on their outage site, and a seeming update (2 hours est. restore, which was goalpost-moved about 6 times), they extended the estimated fix out to midnight (from about noon when they gave us that one). Missus and i said skrew that, we hopped on over to a nice hotel in Lakeway for the evening - good decision.  Then we read a cryptic share posted by our Bee Cave Mayor (Bee Cave has one and it's not (quite) Gomer Pyle or Helen Crump). She was sharing blamespeak by AE, stuff like "when the developer put this in he did blah blah.." and tech speak like "we need to have a loop return to allow multiple access to the location"  - sounded more like a sex ed talk on fertilization than electric stuff. But what got us was this part: "We have yet to determine the actual location of the break (although somehow they seemed to know enough to blame it on "someone digging" - yet no name, location, or purpose given. Ni-i-i-ce deflection). So "after 4 hours we have no idea what happened or where to try and find the problem." Beautiful. The days before, I spent some time prepping the well as usual with space heater and a few lights, always works. But now there was no power to it - would it be pointless? That was about my only worry, the rest I said we'd deal with if/when. But we were not gonna sit in a cold house staring at dying phones.  Eventually they gave "good news" on the outage app - our power would return by 7:30 p.m. Sure enough, neighbors reported power at about that time - followed by a flickering over the next hour - followed by power going out - again. Oops. No problem, you guys are pros. Apparently acc. to neighbor texts, power finally restored w/o flickering 1:30 a.m. We returned home from a great relaxing stay by about 10:30 this a.m. House warm water flowing(!) except for final stop (bathroom faucets). I opened cabinets and expect it to thaw, keeping an eye out for problems. But we have water! 

    3 ice/major cold event, 3 power fails. Neighborhood is pissed. We're going to go to the mayor with pitchforks and tell her to get someone from AE out here to do a damn assessment of the infrastructure. If the neighborhood wiring is akin to the Douglas phone-on-the-pole on Green Acres, then we want to know so we can outlay to fix it. "The way it was done 50 years ago" is complete bullshit. AE ran a Usain Bolt dash out here in the 70's to claim electric here with Pedernales in the area. So now, you bastiges fix it. Yeah, like that'll happen. The '21 storm I can sort of understand (though we found out our outage was due to a transformer blow and power would have remained on otherwise). The '23 Ice Dump - again a piece of infrastructure went kerplunk and we were without for 24+ hours. This one? Proud to say that in the vast, great expanse of the Greater Austin Metroplex, one neighborhood - one tiny, lil' group of settlements - mine - was out - the ONLY group outage all day. We're gonna do some stuff and stuff to get some answers. Not cool. 

    Most of the time, the fear and paranoia preceding one of these events is regrettable if not funny (though after '21 peoples' anxieties can certainly be more understood). But apparently in our enclave, if you get below 30°, those scenarios are real. This isn't a destitute area and we want answers - the authorities say they'll give them to us after this - but of course we'll see. But if it's time to upgrade something, then DO IT. 

    I do have a 15K big honking generator that will easily power the entire house if needed. So why didn't I set it up? Good question but long answer. However next time I'll probably drag the SOB out and get it ready if needed. With this event, even with our recent history, I couldn't conceive of losing power - ERCOT had a lot, there was NO precip (at least power-killing kind) in this forecast, zip. I thought no problem. Wrong [Trump meme].

    Half-confidently expect power to hold, if not we'll motor it to the hotel for another night. So much better.

    So yeah, you weren't "that guy."

    See ya at the next weather disaster - whether real or overblown. Stay cool.

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