Weathered Questions 5.10

Yeah.

Well, so you mentioned that word there, training, right? That's something that we use as meteorologists a lot.

Maybe you've heard that before.

Training storms are those that just like Kai just described, essentially, they just keep going over the exact same area over and over and over.

And if you look at a radar image of these storms, it might look like the storm is hardly even moving.

And it's literally just sitting over top of a city or a certain area.

And in part, that's kind of true.

What's actually happening is that storm itself is moving, but then it's kind of regenerating on the back end.

So it's kind of dying out on the front, regenerating on the back.

And so while the true storm itself is moving with, you know, the steering winds and stuff, it's, The precipitation does not actually move and continues to occur over the same area.

And so there's a couple of different reasons that can happen.

And there's also a couple of different kind of flavors, I guess, of those training storms as well.

The simplest version is probably just a stationary front where you have something that is Usually like a warm front and a cold front maybe that are kind of competing against each other, not allowing those boundaries to move on as they normally would.

And so you get that stalled boundary that basically just doesn't let the weather keep moving forward.

And so then that's when you get these areas that just constantly get precipitation over and over and over again.

And, yeah, that's where you can get, especially, you know, in the summer months and in humid Midwest, if you have enough moisture available, it's where you can get some pretty tricky situations with maybe some flash flooding or things like that.

But that's probably the simplest explanation.

There's also some opportunities for, you know, upper level winds and other things to get involved in.

As well as we talked a little bit in the last couple of episodes here, or really a couple episodes this season, I think, about the low-level jet.

That can also have an influence in it, too.

But that's probably the simplest explanation.

And we do try to keep things at least a little bit on the simple side here.

Yeah, probably has to do with the wind, too, a little bit.

Either the winds are really slow, so it's not really moving the storm very much, or they just keep moving in the exact same spot over and over and over again.

It's like focusing a hairdryer in one spot, and it just doesn't want to move.