The Weather Observer

My oldest daughter Deanna, has been asking to make a homemade tornado project for awhile. Today I got the idea of taken two 2-liter bottles and taping them together with army duct tape. To make the project work, I took one of the caps and cut a hole in the top. I probably should have made the hole bigger but it works. Turn the bottle upside down and swirl it around and you get a tornado, it’s that simple. Can’t beat a homemade project to teach the kids about the weather!

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While I was away leading and training soldiers in the field for a deployment, we had a small line of showers around the Chester area. Since I was not here, my wonderful daughter, decided to take the camera and video tape the cloud to cloud lightning and some of the cloud to ground lightning. She did have a little help from her mother, aka sexy redhead. It is a longer video than I normally posted but the comments from the weather girl was just too great to pass up.

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A backup to the GOES weather satellite lifted off at 6:51 p.m. (EDT) on Saturday night from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The satellite named GOES-O for now will be a backup to the system that provides about 60 percent of the images of Earth.

NOAA has two operational GOES satellites hovering 22,300 miles above the equator – GOES-12, in the east, and GOES-11, in the west – each provide continuous observations of environmental conditions of North, Central and South America and surrounding oceans. While these two are operational, another GOES satellite, GOES-13, is in orbital storage and can be activated if one of the other satellites experiences trouble.

With the launch of the latest GOES satellite, NOAA will have another backup. Approximately 24 days after launch, Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems will turn engineering control over to NASA. About five months later, NASA will transfer operational control of GOES-14 to NOAA. The satellite will be checked out, stored in orbit and available for activation should one of the operational GOES satellites degrade or exhaust its fuel.

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We have a high pressure system pushing into the area. Thanks to this the cloud coverage is moving out of the area. We have lots of cumulus clouds in the area that are making the skies beautiful to watch. The rain chances will increase for the time being but decrease as the week goes on.

Over the weekend we had temperatures in the upper 90’s with heat index around 105. Temperatures are about the same for the start of the week, and will increase as it goes on. As the high pressure system pushes into the area the temperatures will increase and the rain chances will decrease. This is good in a way, because we will be conducting a field exercise over the weekend and could really do without the rain. Other than that there is nothing major I see weather wise coming into the area anytime soon.

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