Nice day due a high pressure systems

Today high was 29F with clear skies and sunshine! With this beautiful day and March's sun able came a lot of snow melt. This is nice because the roads are finally clear, for the most part. But, the sidewalks are all full of water puddles and that isn't any fun.

Current conditions include a tempertaure of 28F. Humidity is at 53%, with a dew point of 13F. Looking at the surface map here we can see that skies are clear, with wind coming from the N around 7 mph. The barometric reading is at 30.29". Together all these conditions make sense since there is a high pressure cell in northern Iowa. Typically, high pressure cells are associated with clear skies and nice weather.

Here are the current wind conditions. We can definitely see that nothing major is taking place in our region of the U.S. However, we can see winds patterns are much stronger in the west and on the east coast. If you take a look at the surface map above you can see that there are some low pressure systems in these regions causing this.

This is a picture I took of the sky looking south from my house. Here we can see a small amount of cirrus clouds. About 30 minutes before I took this picture there were no clouds located in this area, they were only to the north and west. By comapring the movement of the clouds to the wind and surface map, these patterns make complete sense. These cirrus clouds also indicate fair to pleasant weather.



After seeing the strong winds patterns from the wind map and noticing the low pressure cells on the surface map I thought it would only be appropriate to take a look at these conditions. The surface map below shows high pressure cells going up through the plains area. As we already discussed, this makes complete sense with our current weather conditions and wind patterns. We see a few low pressure cells in the west which is causing the crazy weather patterns we're seeing in this region, due to the Rocky Mountains. We also see a low pressure cell located off the east coast, with radar indicating light to moderate rain in these areas. That poor east coast is really getting hit hard this year. I'm glad I'm not there, it makes me appreciated Wisconsin's weather a bit more.  

I couldn't help myself but to check out the water vapor in these regions after seeing all these other factors. Oh yeah, check out the water vapor swirling counterclockwise into the coastal land from the ocean. This is from water evaporating into the atmosphere from the ocean. Once this warm, saturated air hits land it rises over cooler drier and eventually condenses creating precipitation. This time it's in the form of rain instead of snow though. I bet they're happy about that.

Temps are forecasted to rise the rest of the week, possibly up to about 40F by Friday. We are expecting another storm system is expected to hit on Saturday. This time precipitation is forecasted to be in the form of rain instead of snow though. It shouldn't be too bad.