Matt's Weather Rapport is written by Vermont-based journalist and weather reporter Matt Sutkoski. This blog has a nationwide and worldwide focus, with particular interest in Vermont and the Northeast. Look to Matt's Weather Rapport for expert analysis of weather events, news, the latest on climate change science, fun stuff, and wild photos and videos of big weather events. Also check for my frequent quick weather updates on Twitter, @mattalltradesb
Current forecasts have Kate getting up to 50 mph or so, maybe a little stronger.
Hurricanes and tropical storms do occasionally form in the Atlantic basin during November, though we are well past the peak of hurricane season. We've had a November tropical storm in the Atlantic once every two years since 2009.
Unlike Kate, sometimes November tropical storms or hurricanes do make landfall in the United States, too. Just not this time.
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center outlines areas under threat for severe weather Wednesday.
Parts of the Midwest, especially Missouri, southern Illinois and northern Arkansas, are bracing for an outbreak of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms on Wednesday.
This could be the biggest round of nasty twisters and storms the nation has seen in weeks or months.
The typical height of the tornado season is the late spring and early summer, when strong sun energizes the atmosphere, and hefty storm systems can add spin, suck up hot, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico, and pull down chilly, wintry air from Canada.
These are most of the ingredients you need for a severe weather outbreak.
Once you get into the summer, the contrasts of air masses isn't so great, and you don't get big, strong low pressure systems moving into the Plains to set off tornado outbreaks.
You still get tornadoes in the summer, but usually not many big ones at once.
In the fall, we start to get strong low pressure systems moving into the middle of the country again. The sun's strength is much weaker, and that's one reason why these autumn storms don't usually cause a lot of tornadoes.
Still, some of these autumn storms are pretty damn dynamic, and can cause big severe weather outbreaks. Forecasters are worried that one such developing storm has the potential to do this.
The tornadoes and a squall line that race to the East Coast in this outbreak killed 11 people and caused a bit over a billion dollars in damage.
Aerial view of damage in Washington, Illinois after a November, 2013 EF4 tornado.
You can watch the terror inside one of these homes destroyed by one of the November, 2013 tornadoes in Washington, Illinois in the video at the bottom of this post.
We have a strong El Nino this year, and that can encourage unusually dynamic and strong storm systems across the southern United States this fall and winter.
This gives us the potential for more tornadoes - more than the small numbers we usually get - along the Gulf Coast states and Florida over the winter.
As for Wednesday's expected storm outbreak, the devil as always, is still in the details.
As is the case with many of these types of storms, especially in the autumn, the storms could rapidly form into a squall line, which could possibly reduce the number of tornadoes but still cause widespread wind damage.
A number of the storms within such a squall line could maintain rotation, and continue to spin off tornadoes.
If you live anywhere in the Midwest and Tennessee Valley, keep an eye to the sky and an ear to NOAA weather radio or other reliable media to listen for tornado or severe storm warning.
If they tell you to hide in your basement, get into a sturdy building or take any similar precautions, just do it. The life you save might be your own.
The two people in this scary tornado video from November, 2013 survived exactly because they fled to the basement. You see the guy filming the tornado, then joining his daughter in the basement, the screen goes black as you hear them terrified in the basement, then they emerge after the tornado passes to see what's left of the house:
Shelf clouds are often scary looking, and are a sign that a severe thunderstorm is approaching, so you want to take cover.
However, they aren't tornadoes. Sometimes shelf clouds hang low, as little as a couple hundred feet off the ground and scud clouds hanging below them resemble tornadoes. But shelf clouds aren't tornadic.
Cyclone Chapala last week, left, and Cyclone Megh, now, right seem like identical twins in the Arabian Sea.
Last week, we talked about rare Cyclone Chapala, which became the first tropical storm of hurricane strength to strike the coast of Yemen.
As expected, Chapala caused a huge disaster, mostly through flooding. Yemen is normally arid, and Chapala dropped the same amount of rain in a couple days as normally falls there over several years.
You do get the occasional cyclone (hurricanes as we call them in the good ole US of A) in the Arabian Sea, but not often. And they tend not to threaten to make landfall with any degree of huge strength.
But this year is different. This new cyclone, named Megh, if it indeed makes it to Yemen, might not be a full strength hurricane, but it will cause havoc by bringing lots more rain to a desert region already strangely saturated by the previous Cyclone Chapala.
Socotra was being battered again Sunday by this new Cyclone Megh as it travels towards Yemen, so things will only get worse.
Chapala and Megh were encouraged to develop by record high water temperatures in the Arabian Sea. Tropical cyclones are more likely to thrive the warmer the water gets.
A number of other factors are probably also contributing to the twin Arabian Sea cyclones, including global weather pattern called the Madden Julian Oscillation,which is an area of moisture and instability that often slowly circles the equatorial globe. When the MJO is in certain locations, it can encourage tropical storm development.
My guess is global warming contributed, but is not the only reason for the high Arabian Sea temperatures that contributed to the double cyclone disaster. Plus, there was just some bad luck involving weather conditions that favored tropical storm development.
As is the usual case, global warming could well be making what would have been a bad situation in Yemen worse.
Roof flies off a Fort Worth, Texas bank during a small tornado Friday. Image o the left is the roof in the parking lot later. Images from WeatherNation.
Strong tornadoes are usually the ones that grab all the headlines as the maurade through towns and cities, blowing apart everything that comes in their path.
The fact is most tornadoes are relatively weak. According to the National Climatic Data Center,usually about 30 or 40 tornadoes annually in the United States are EF3 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale. That's out of roughly 1,000 reported each year.
EF3s have winds of 136 mph or greater.
So, we don't really get all that many super big tornadoes. Most are small. But those little ones can certainly cause drama. One such tornado, and EF0 that hit Fort Worth, Texas Friday, took the roof off a bank building.
It had winds of 80 to 85 mph, and being weak and small, it's hard to see at first in the video, below. Then the roof goes and the people filming start swearing like crazy (so NSFW)
No injuries were reported with this brief tornado, though, which is good:
"Mackerel sky" over St. Albans, Vermont Thursday afternoon.
You'll see in this post that I enjoyed some beautiful clouds that drifted over my home in northwestern Vermont Thursday afternoon.
You'd better appreciate them, because I had to endure near record temperatures of around 70 degrees to capture these images.
Yes, weather photographers do have to put up with brutal conditions when documenting changing conditions.
Anyway, this was a classic case of mackerel sky, named so because the clouds resemble scales of the fish.
As always, there are different forms mackerel sky can take. Often, their size is smaller, and are in the form of clouds much higher aloft than the ones you see here. Those higher, somewhat wispier ones are almost always a sign that precipitation is on the way.
The ones you see in these photographs are lower in elevation, and are often a sign of a temporary improvement in weather before a cold front comes along. (You can click on each photo to make them bigger and easier to see.)
This was true. The sky was partly to mostly cloudy throughout Thursday, and at one point, some darkish ones threatened showers.
But the threatening clouds passed by mid afternoon, and we were left with these striking clouds you see in this here blog post thingy.
What was also true is these mackerel clouds, - altocumulus if you want to get all jargon-y, were indeed appearing out ahead of a cold front.
Another view of mackerel sky - altocumulus clouds -
over St. Albans, Vermont Thursday.
The airmass we were in yesterday was part of a broad area of record and near record high temperatures across much of the eastern third of the nation.
The high temperature in Burlington, Vermont - close to my house - was 70 degrees Thursday, missing the record high for the date by just two degrees.
Meanwhile, Montpelier, Vermont set a record high of 73 degrees Thursday. St. Johnsbury, Vermont also had a record high, 71 degrees there.
Massena, in northern New York had a record high of 73. Even the summit of Mount Mansfield, Vermont got into the act, reaching a record high of 58 degrees.
After another very warm day today, a cold front will sweep through later, dropping daytime temperatures into the more seasonable 40s and low 50s.
The warm weather mackerel sky over my house Thursday did its job by forecasting an approaching cold front more beautifully than any human could.
A beautiful, uncharacteristically clear November morning in Georgia, Vermont Wednesday. Temperatures soared into the upper 60s in the region by afternoon.
Where I live in northwestern Vermont, the November weather almost always poses a challenge when I'm rushing to complete outdoor garden and yard chores before the rapidly onrushing winter hits.
It's usually drizzly and damp and dark. It's usually cold. Usually windy. Sometimes it snows. The sky is almost always covered with a dreary overcast.
Which makes this uncharacteristically sunny, warm week glorious.
Today is the third November day in a row I will be working outside in the sunshine, sweating a bit in shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt as I rake the leaves and put the gardens to bed.
Here in Vermont, we're sharing in a glorious Indian Summer that has brought record highs to much of the eastern two thirds of the nation.
The heat will gradually be swept away between now and the weekend, but for now, it's amazing.
No records have been set in Vermont so far, but they might today and tomorrow. Still, sunshine with temperatures in the upper 60s can't be beat in a Vermont November, especially when daytime highs are normally in the upper 40s.
The November warmth has been more intense in much of the rest of the eastern United States. Seven of Michigan's nine major weather stations hit record highs on Wednesday. It was 79 in Flint, and 77 in Detroit, which was the warmest for so late in the season.
Everywhere in the East is having temperatures way, way above average for this time of year, but the epicenter is Florida, where several cities had all time record November highs this week, not just recor highs for the date.
New or tied record highs for November in Florida included 92 in Tampa, 90 in Daytona Beach, 91 in Gainesville and 89 in Jacksonville. Normal high temperatures in the northern half of Florida this time of year are between 75 and 80 degrees.
As I noted, a cooldown is coming to the eastern half of the United States by the weekend, but it's not exactly going to be wintry yet.
A massive high pressure system of fair weather, mostly of Pacific Ocean origin, will settle across the eastern United States early next week, leading to more above normal temperatures, just not as extremely warm as it's been this week. The Climate Prediction Center has above normal temperaturesgenerally hanging on in the eastern two thirds of the United States well into mid-November
