Storm chasers

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) on Monday said that the first named storm of the 2019 Atlantic Season had formed hundreds of miles southwest of Bermuda. It was given the name Andrea and classified a subtropical storm by the NHC.

"Data from an Air Force Reserve reconnaissance aircraft indicate that the low-pressure system located several hundred miles southwest of Bermuda has developed a well-defined center with maximum sustained winds of about 40 mph," the NHC said in an advisory.

AccuWeather meteorologists have been monitoring the low-pressure system, which has largely existed as an area of showers and thunderstorms, since last week. On Monday, it moved to the north of the Bahamas as it gathered strength, prompting the NHC to send the aircraft to examine the storm.

AccuWeather Hurricane Expert Dan Kottlowski emphasized that, while the storm is strong enough to be given a name, it is not an impressive weather system.

"This is going to be a very short-lived storm," Kottlowski said. "It probably will not survive past Tuesday night and will definitely be moving away from Bermuda by then," Kottlowski said cool water temperatures will be the storm's downfall. He said water temperatures in the Atlantic where Andrea is moving above are about 78 degrees Fahrenheit (26C). As the storm moves northwest, the water it encounters will only become cooler.

According to the NHC's forecast cone, Andrea is expected to weaken to a depression by early Wednesday morning before it even reaches Bermuda. "The impacts [to Bermuda] will be gusty winds, brief heavy rainfall, and rough surf," Kottlowski said. Anyone captaining an ocean vessel in the area should take extra caution, but Kottlowksi said this storm would not be a major event for Bermuda. "They have worse winter storms than this will be," he added.

Kottlowksi also advised not to read too much into what this means for the rest of the Atlantic Basin hurricane season. "Early-season development like this does not portend what the rest of the hurricane season will bring, especially since this is a weak storm," he said.

But it does take a name off the 2019 Atlantic hurricane season list, meaning the next tropical storm that develops in the Atlantic will be called Barry.

                            By Renee Duff, AccuWeather Meteorologist

If you didn't know what a moonbow is, I'm sure you'll get it just at the moment you'll see the picture sent to us by Windy user, captain Serge Prakhov (Thank you, captain Prakhov!).

A moonbow (also known as a lunar rainbow or white rainbow) is a rainbow produced by moonlight rather than sunlight.

A moonbow often appears to be white because the light is usually too faint to excite our cone color receptors. Still, you can capture the colors in a moonbow on a film or digital camera set to a longer exposure.

Same as a solar rainbow, moonbow's formation is caused by the refraction of light in water droplets and it is always positioned in the opposite part of the sky from the moon relative to the observer.

This weather phenomenon is known at least since Aristotle's Meteorology circa 350 BCE.

Moonbow at Pacific Ocean, 10 May 2017, Serge Prakhov

A spiraling cloud pattern, known as a von Kármán vortex, formed off the west coast of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula on May 13, 2019. The atmospheric phenomenon seen here by NOAA-20 was named after Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian-American aerospace engineer who co-founded NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Von Kármán vortices typically form when the prevailing wind is diverted by elevated land features such as islands, mountaintops or volcanoes. These topographic features disrupt the flow of the air, and the result is beautiful spiral patterns in the clouds. In this case, the von Kármán vortices formed off the southeast coast of Guadalupe Island, which is located about 150 miles off the west coast of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula.

This image was created by combining three of the high resolution thermal and visible channels from the NOAA-20 satellite's VIIRS sensor. The combination of these channels enhances the contrast between clouds, water, and land surfaces, with the ocean appearing black in this imagery.

Credits: NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory

Robert Rohde, who is a Lead Scientist at Berkeley Earth, shared interesting thread on his Twitter account.
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Rapidly rising temperatures in the Arctic are causing declines in sea ice,with larger percentage declines in the annual minima than the maxima.

Comparison of Arctic sea ice distributions on September 21 in 1979 and 2018, near the time of the annual minimum.

The minimum sea ice extent was ~1/3 lower in 2018.

Recently, sea ice reductions have allowed brief periods of navigable open water each year.

Comparison of Arctic sea ice distributions on March 13 in 1979 and 2019, near the time of the annual maximum. The maximum sea ice extent was 10% lower in 2019.

The annual average temperature in the Arctic Ocean has risen about 3 C (5.4 F) since the 1970s.

Arctic warming is driven by the buildup of greenhouse gases, but it has also been amplified by the loss of sea ice, which allows more sunlight to be absorbed in the Arctic Ocean.

@tylliono Imperial measurements is an option, you can just go into settings and change to imperial from metric.

@tanzer33 Is the Windy app fully up to date? Could you possibly send a screenshot to help show what the GUI problem is?

@pacificfinreaper Have you changed the measurements on your phone manually and it didn't keep, or do you need help with finding the settings in the app to do that?

@vgkfan83 Have you tried disabling the option for the spot forecast? The map by itself shouldn't have a location dot on it.

Tornado near Călărași, Romania

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