What is with this strange weather pattern. It’s like a comma. It’s a band of clouds that start at Texas and come up to South Dakota (my state) and curves in a circular motion.
Here is a satellite photo
Is it caused by Ivan?
I’m not sure what caused it, but I live on the MN/WI border, right where that white stripe is. I left school this afternoon as that was moving into the area. The outside temperature (according to my car’s gauge, which is accurate) read 79º when I left school - it was warm and sunny. As I drove home I saw the huge black clouds of this front coming in from the west, and I watched as my temperature gauge dropped 17º in the fifteen minutes it takes for me to drive home. It was freaky. By the time I got home it was pouring out and chilly.
According to this page, that’s a “midlatitude cyclone”—a cyclone being a low-pressure area around which winds move counterclockwise (in the northern hemisphere). Hurricanes are very powerful tropical cyclones, but I doubt that your weather was caused by any hurricane. I think what you’ve got is actually a pretty common weather pattern.
As previously posted, it’s a common low-pressure area.
A hurricane is a very low pressure area with high winds and rotates in the same direction.
Other than Ivan also being a low pressure area, there’s no connection.
You can see your low pressure area on this map, and you can see Ivan in the lower left corner.
Yep… in the wintertime, the local weatherbimbos refer to that as “a cold front” or a “low pressure system” or even a “winter storm.”
That one is just particularly well defined. Probably because the temperature gradient across it is greater this time of year.
I was going to call it a cold front. :o
Isn’t that Jeanne, rather than Ivan?
It’s a very pretty example of one though. They don’t usually have tails that long, but we’ve had 3 or 4 similar ones this summer.
You’re right. My mistake.
It’s also the lower right corner, not the left corner.
If you click on the 24-hour rotation in the first link, you can see the front moving across the nation from west to east.
rowrrbazzle
True, as far as it goes, but that is not a very good definition. One of the distinguishing features of a tropical cylcone, as opposed to a baroclinic cyclone, is that the lowest pressure is concentrated at the center. If you look at a baroclinic cyclone, you will not see the concentrated lowest pressure at the center. There are other characteristics of a tropical cyclone, primarily that it gets its energy from the latent heat energy of warm waters.