WKU Meteorology

My April 12th post titled “Major League Baseball and cold April weather” has attracted some media attention. Jayson Stark of ESPN mentioned my article here (scroll down 2/3 of the way and look under “Cold Spell”). A sportswriter from the Canton (OH) rep wrote an editorial on it here. A cable weather show in Pennsylvania produced a 3 minute segment you can see here (click the green box on the bottom row) that featured my results. I was also linked to the baseball website Hardball Times here. It just shows that you never know what kind of research will get people interested.

Sunday 9:00 pm CDT update: What you see is what you get. No changes. See below for more details. Good luck!!

Saturday 9:00 pm CDT update: No changes to the forecast. See the Friday update for more details. This has been well-modeled from the being and it looks like the low will be centered over southern CT during the race. The heaviest rain should end by early morning but showers will be expected throughout the race. Final update will be Sunday evening. Continue reading →

The recent record-breaking cold April 6-9 that led to the cancellation of the Cleveland-Seattle series at Jacobs Field has had sportsradio people questioning why Major League Baseball schedules games at cold weather cities without a domed stadium during the first week of April. I decided to analyze the historical frequency of how often cold and/or snowy weather can be expected to occur at six cold weather non-domed baseball cities; Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Boston, and New York. Continue reading →

Storm #1 is currently underway across the central portion of the United States. A couple of lines of thundershowers have moved across south-central KY Wednesday with several inches of snow occurring north of I-80 in the Midwest. For the latest on the severe threat I will defer to the experts at the SPC. Storm #2 is currently over California and will move across Texas and into the Mid-South Friday-Saturday. The models are suggesting this storm will take a dramatically different track from previous runs and signs are pointing to a major Northeast Blizzard for Sunday-Monday. Continue reading →

Don’t put away the sweaters and winter jackets just yet. We have not seen the last of cold temperatures across the Midwest and Mid-South and areas near the Great Lakes have not seen the last of the white stuff either. Continue reading →

I’ve been getting this question a lot from my Meteorology students. The culprit for the arctic blast is our very warm March . Whenever a large portion of the U.S. has such warm temperature anomalies, it means that Canada was equally as cold. The zonal pattern that led to the anomalous warmth broke down since a zonal pattern is baroclinically unstable over time. The East Pacific Oscillation (EPO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) have also been somewhat well correlated since December. Continue reading →