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| Satellite photo of the Northeast taken after 1 pm Saturday features a dry slot and a squall line, among other things. Click on the photo to make it bigger and easier to pick out features. |
Things were pretty weird and wild throughout the Northeast for that matter. The satellite photos help tell the story.
The first visible satellite image in this post was taken shortly after 1 p.m. Saturday. Click on it to make it bigger and easier to see the features.
Up here in Vermont, you see clouds to our east, which was the cold, rainy spell we had in the morning. As you can see, skies had abruptly cleared after that and temperatures shot upwards.
The mostly clear skies were something called a dry slot. The center of the big storm was over the Great Lakes, and you can see some of its clouds in the far left of the photo.
The storm was strong enough to pull a plume of warm, dry air up from the southwest into its circulation, and that tongue of spring-like air reached us here in Vermont. Temperatures got as high as 68 in Burlington, and 69 in Bennington, the warmest weather since mid-November.
The dull patchy white you see in the photo in the Adirondacks and east of Vermont's Champlain Valley is the still-reasonably deep snow cover lingering.
You can also see trouble brewing in this satellite photo. Above the warm layer of air, the storm was cooling the upper atmosphere. The contrast was making the air unstable. The result was that patch of bright white clouds over western New York and central Pennsylvania. That was a squall line of thunderstorms,. It was causing a lot of damage when the satellite photo was taken.
SQUALL LINE ADVANCES
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| Satellite photo around 6 p.m. Saturday. A nasty squall line of thunderstorms and possible tornadoes is seen approaching New Jersey and Delaware. Up here in Vermont, just a smattering of tame showers,. |
That collection of severe thunderstorms that was in Pennsylvania in this photo is now a squall line extending from south of Albany, New York to western Virginia.
If you look close, you can see individual thunderstorms in that line. A lot of them had supercell characteristics, many were rotating and some had at least the potential to produce tornadoes. Several tornado warnings popped up as this line passed through, especially in New Jersey and Delaware.
So far, the National Weather Service office in Mount Holly, New Jersey has confirmed four tornadoes in New Jersey and one in Bridgeville, Delaware. It's possible more might be confirmed.
The Bridgeville tornado claimed one life. As you can imagine, it's very rare to have a tornado tragedy like that in the Mid-Atlantic states at the end of March.
New Jersey has now already had five tornadoes this year, including one in February. New Jersey doesn't have that many tornadoes, and when they do, it's almost always between May and September,
A whopping 248 reports of thunderstorm wind damage came in yesterday, mostly in Ohio, western New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware
Up here in Vermont, things weren't nearly as dramatic. Some fairly hefty thunderstorms passed through far southern parts of the state, but no real damage was done.
If you look closely at the satellite pic, you see some bubbly little clouds scattered around Vermont. Those were convective showers, touched off by more modest instability than further south.
After the cold front came through in the evening, Vermont abruptly lost its brief taste of spring. Light rain showers sprang up, and changed to snow flurries in a few places. Burlington went from 61 degrees at 7 p.m. to 50 at 8 p.m. then down to 39 by midnight.
Today's weather, though bright, was typical of the first half of March. But don't worry, it's April. We're not guaranteed super warm weather, but it'll be at least reasonable through this week.
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