That weird "ox-bow" structure has been fairly stable for almost a week. The whole thing is finally starting to move East, but I'm still finding ice in the vernal pools as recently as this morning.



What I think is interesting is to overlay the jet stream model on the global wave height map. Inside of the ox-bow is very flat, but the trailing edge is generating waves. It also looks like in another week we could get some more precip, barring the formation of another one of these strange jet stream patterns.

I took a basic weather/climate class, so I cannot really interpret these maps. We have flood warnings here....

Earlier this year, for us, it was some weirdly stable Omega pattern. (The oxbow looks like the Omega, are they the same thing?)

Yesterday it was +35F and today +15. Yesterday's rain is now frozen, fortunitly here mush (really really wet snow) fell from the sky so it isn't a smooth frozen

Is this a product of our "la nada" condition this winter?

Watching the Sunday night football game, at kickoff it was warmer in Mass that at home in California. My New Hampshire brother made sure I wouldn't miss that factoid.

I'm ready for things to shift back to something resembling normal. I'd trade rain for this freezy stuff in a heartbeat; my mouth barely functioned and I thought my ears had fallen off after my bike ride to work this morning. (It's still better than last winter's persistent dry-dry-dry conditions.)

Cheers,

ETSU, each map is read similarly to a topo map. The jet stream pattern shows shades of gray where the "jet stream" is, and the global wave height map does the same thing only in color (deep blue is very small waves and red are large waves). As an example, the deep blue along the southern California coast means that the waves really suck right now and my son verified that for me this morning.

Just an amature here, btw. Here is one from Jan 2 with a similar pattern.



Here is near the start of the current one.



Heather, these sure look like an Omega pattern to me. I like to call them ox- bows because the way the form and dissipate reminds me of a meandering river (I also probably do it because of a personality defect). I've likened the jet stream hitting the west coast to a person holding the hose on the ground, but 3 feet back from the nossle and with the water on full blast. If you have a little time, check out this site

Jet Stream Map Menu

Go to the archive function up top and create a 30 day simulation of what happened the last part of Dec and in early Jan. Pretty interesting stuff.

So ... as an aside, we cannot post animation on this site such as the one created at the site above?