Todd Gross' Boston Weather and Southern New England Forecasts

TWIN RAINBOWS

This incredible shot from Newport, RI from our Todd Gross Support team member Barry shows the twin rainbows that graced most of our skies prior to sunset Sunday evening. The storm came in with a bang, but left to the east, and the sunlight shining back on the raindrops as it was setting in the west set off an incredible rainbow display. You see, the raindrops, reflect and refract the light BACK at you, splitting white light into the array of colors that you see...

Clikc on the image for the full impact.

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Comet Piece Passed in front of Ring Nebula

From SpaceWeather.Com:  THIS WAS LAST NIGHT, SUNDAY NIGHT !!!!!!

PHOTO-OP: MOn May 8th at approximately 0300 UT (11 pm EDT on May 7th), fragment C of dying comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 passed very close to the Ring Nebula in Lyra. The view through backyard telescopes was wonderful, but we had high thin clouds here, unfortunately. Here is a view as publicized on spaceweather.com . Click on this for its magnificence!   Our own John Lanoue shot the comet a day before, you can find his photo at toddgross.com/astrophotography

Bombogesis

January 23 UPDATE: You may recall that the original bomb piece included a link to Brooks Garner's blog and WIS-TV web-weather.. Well, we HAVE heard from him.. Below describes their recent unusual conditions..

Todd,

     Thought you might be interested in this:

     We're having one heck of wedge today in South Carolina. It's near
     freezing in our northern viewing area, and near 65 in our southern
     viewing area! It's all thanks to cold air damming, around a stubborn
     area of High Pressure in the DelMarVa. As you know, it gets wedged
     down the eastern spine of the Apps, into SC. Even though 850 temps
     are 9+C, with a 50kt LLJ, the surface has a NNE wind at 5, with a
     shallow layer of CHILL! Brrr. We had icing late last week in a
     similar situation. The difference was that the air was much dryer
     last week. It was just as "warm" (well, "cold") but dews were in the
     teens. Last week when it started raining thru that dry air, major
     evap. cooling occured, which dropped temps from the low 40s, to the
     upper 20s! This go around, we're marginally freezing. (SEE IMAGE BELOW)

     It's 67 in Charleston, and 39 in Columbia -- just a one hour drive!!
     The mix of orographic lift and associated dry adiabatic cooling, plus
     some evap. cooling with somewhat low dews is driving inland temps to
     chi-chi-chilllly levels! It's flipflops for the beaches and winter
     coats for the Piedmont.

-Brooks

Jan 16, 2007 - The late week event features damaging winds on Saturday following a  "bombogenesis" or rapid intensification of a storm. Read more about bombogenesis at Jeff Haby's HabysHints. Learn more about Low Pressure systems At the University of Illinois WW2010 page "Low Pressure Centers".

Read more about storms at NASA's Clouds Generated During Midlatitude Storms

 

 

"Categorizing storms according to their sea level pressure patterns is   another way of classifying storms. By plotting central sea level pressure against time a pressure profile can be created. All storms do not conform to the same sea level pressure pattern throughout its life. Some storms can be classified as classical storms. These are storms where their pressure profiles are "V" shaped or have a dip pattern in pressure. Oscillating storms are those with insignificant pressure changes, while ascending storms increase in pressure over time. Descending storms are those that decrease over time in pressure only."

Also possibly of interest given the anomalous season thus far:
Northern Hemisphere Winter Surface Temperature Predictions based on Land-Atmosphere Fall Anomalies

Watch an Eagle Feed Her Young

Eagles have hatched THIS WEEK! The place to head for this article and so much more is on John Brigg's birding page, part of my our growing network of weather, astronomy, and nature pages. You won't believe some of the stuff coming. Now I'm not alone in spreading the nature/weather/astro connection. Here is just a sample:
Hurricane Page(s)
Astrophotography
Astronomy Gear Reviews
Lawn Care
Weather History and Historical Weather Fiction
Global Weather
I'm also looking for an author about Golfing, if anyone sees a tie in.

SPRING PEEPERS ARE PEEPING!

The annual riot of tree frogs is here! CLICK HERE to find out all about THE SPRING PEEPERS, a special feature on MY CAPE AND ISLANDS WEATHER PAGE. 

Total Eclipse - No show here but..

The moon got in the way between the Earth and the Sun resulting in a total eclipse in Africa and Turkey and many distant areas from the U.S. earlier today, so I didn't "play it up" but for more information CLICK HERE or go to the old standby for astronomy sky events: spaceweather.com Also, my friend, Bruce Goren has provided the link to see the streaming video.

Spring has sprung?

Plan on seeing many more of these this week. Crocuses and even daffodils will start blooming as temperatures move into the 50s. These were taken along Buzzard's Bay.

Also .. as mentioned in another post, the spring peepers, are coming out THIS WEEK, right now..

SUNSPOTS RETURN!

I noticed it the other day (through special filters) and shrugged it off, but we are at sunspot MINIMUM now, in the roughly 11 year cycle. This is interesting because there were actually NO sunspots to be found on the sun two weeks ago even in telescopes. Now that is what I call a minimum. If you click THIS LINK you will see a loop of what the sun usually looks like. And if you click HERE you will find out why scientists are concerned about sunspots in the next few years! They are storms on the sun, cooler areas that hurl particles and energy Earth-bound.

UPDATE: Image upper left.. click on it to see a few sunspots that have now not only formed, weak as they are, they produced an aurora in Northern New England this past weekend, caught by one of our Todd Gross support members!

Mini Comets will be BARELY visible in May

A comet is breaking apart and moving very very close to The Earth in May. It will even be BARELY visible to the naked eye.

The full story from NASA

For MY astrophotos CLICK HERE

JUPITER'S NEW RED SPOT?

If this isn't a hoax, it is one of the biggest pieces of Astronomy News in a long time: A new Red Spot on Jupiter! What is the Great Red Spot? A huge hurricane ever-present storm on Jupiter that has been churning for centuries. Usually smaller "ovals" form, similar, but much smaller to the either red spot (which often look orange and not red at all)  but a truly new Red Spot  would be amazing, rare, and the big question.. is it there for the long haul. See the NASA link above, I hope this is for real.