Pine Island Weather Blog

Radar images are currently not updating due to technical issues with the KTBW (Tampa radar) feed from the NWS. This is a situation that we have no control over and it is impacting all resources that utilize the feeds from the NWS. Once the issue is resolved, the images should start to update normally.

http://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=tbw&product=N0R&overlay=11101111&loop=no

 UPDATE: KTBW appears to be back up and on line just in time for a severe storm!

Due to a tripped breaker, most likely from the big storms that we apparently had over the weekend, the station was down for an extended time over the weekend. The prolonged outage was due to our being out of town until early this morning. Everything should now be back to normal.

One interesting thing of note, prior to this power loss, the system had been up and running continuously for more than 90 days. That’s a record. The PC that collects the weather data is Windows XP and is under a significant load. The longest we’ve had the system run continuously before this was about 43 days.

Again, apologies for the extended outage.

Looks like the rainy season is here. Let’s hope that we continue to see it progress as it has over the last week or so. Last night we saw a significant rain event here ins St. James City, with a very typical summer storm like we haven’t seen in quite a while. Some vivid lighting with frequent cloud to ground strikes, and a total of .88 inches of nice steady rain with a few brief intense downpours. Hopefully this pattern will continue for us for a while to help put a dent in the drought.

Today, June 1 marks the official start of hurricane season in the Atlantic basin. Here’s the extended range forecast’s from both the Colorada State Univerisity Tropical Meteorology Project (Dr.’s Klotzbach and Gray) and from the National Hurricane Center. Take these predictions for what they are worth, which in my opinion, isn’t much.

2008 Predictions

Averages are based on the numbers from the NHC for consistencies sake as that is what I’ve always used when referring to the averages. I mention this because there is a discrepancy between the NHC number and the CSU number. CSU shows the average number of named storms as a little less than 10 (9.6 specifically). CSU uses data going back 58 years where the NHC goes back farther, though I’m not sure of the specifics there.

As part of the Phoenix Mars mission, the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) provided the weather station to measure the climatic conditions on the Red Planet. Even cooler, they have a web page showing the current conditions live from Mars:

Martian Weather Report

And you thought it was cold in Minnesota!