Weekly Weather Report BC edition

Well last weekend had me waking up Sunday like this

if you havent watched stranger things yet, drop everything you're doing and do it NOW

on one hand I suppose the forecast was right, but that scoreline and game in general hurt me deep. While it was so much fun to watch at first...what a collapse

At least I did have a little redemption between man city and UVA losing once again

I seriously spent more time looking at sad UVA fans than making a forecast....

anywho on a more positive note last weekend is over and we have the hokies playing that catholic school up north. Boston College is coming to town this week in what looks to be a deceptively tricky weather forecast which is perfectly relevant to a tricky game for the Hokies and our old offensive coordinator.

this guy's a dude

For the last couple of weeks I've been mentioning troughs and ridges, but I dont think I've ever described what exactly I'm talking about or discussing. To understand those first we might need to go into a bit of review, meteorologists measure the atmosphere and its height in terms of pressure typically (millibars if you want to get really picky) and as such the lower we get the more the pressure increases. You can kind of think of this as the more altitude you gain the more atmosphere there is above you pressing down on you. This creates low and high pressure systems which I know I've covered multiple times in the past (low = bad weather high = clear skies)

Our typical sea level pressure is 1000 mB (millibars or hectopascals) and when we move upward in the atmosphere there are several landmarks for forecasting, most notably in this situation the 500 mb point. The 500 mB height contains winds and temperature profiles really important for dissecting the troughs and ridges I've talked about. Air density is absolutely crucial to understand this concept as well. Cooling air is more dense, and because the troposphere cools with height rising air typically cools, becomes more dense and then falls. Thus an area thats dominated by a cold contingent of air (IE a cold front) will be likely to form a trough, which brings with it rain and cloudy conditions. These troughs are dead give-aways for bad weather. Likewise a ridge is dominated by warm less dense air that sinks and creates clear sky conditions (yes these are very much so tied to high and low pressure systems). Thus when looking at the models those are usually a dead giveaway. Usually on the front end of a trough winds from the high pressure system to the right of it and the low pressure system on the left are both flowing in the same direction creating an area of high vorticity which is really good for creating lift and upward motion. This creates storms... so front end of trough = thunderstorms

troughing and ridging are verbs in a meteorologists vocabulary

However as expected mother nature and weather in general are never that simple. Things like Coriolis and his obsession with rotating objects and winds, Vorticity, friction, shear, pressure gradient forces...and well a bunch of other things that you could write a damn book on can alter the winds and curve them more or less. This can lead to more troughing and ridging orrrrrrrrrr it could lead to this thing called geostrophic balance. Geostrophic balance occurs when basically all of the forces creating curvature and ridges and troughs cancel themselves out. When this happens the atmosphere is pretty stable, there's no real curvature and as such not a chance for vorticity to take over and create issues. As such things stay relatively stable until temperatures fluctuate enough to create a local high or low.

note the PGFs and Coriolis cancelling each other out

so why the hell is the weather guy telling you about this? Well at the moment things are ridging over the east coast, and for those of you in Blacksburg, I haven't really been keeping notes but I'm willing to bet its been pretty freaking nice out these last few days (PLEASE SEND IT MY WAY). however this ridge will give way to a pretty weak trough over the next day or so and lead to a little rain friday night (maybe its a pretty weak ridge, might not get much of anything...like maybe a drizzle) anywho as this ridge comes through it kind of breaks up and the area appears to reach geostrophic balance, or at least close enough that nothing synoptic is really going to give us any kind of issues. In basic terms there's not going to be anything in the area that would make me thing its going to rain beyond about 3 AM saturday morning. Really I think the only thing we really have to keep an eye on is tropical storm Julia and some out flow from that. As such I think we might get some cloud cover but the rain should hold off for what should be a kind of pleasant day for football.

Thats unsightly

So how does this play out in the game? Well with not much humidity or rain present in the game no team can claim an advantage via mother nature. This is good news I hope as I think we boast more talent on our squad. The question is can Fuente's boys cleanup the turnovers and can we finally put to rest the fact that we CANNOT stop mobile QBs. Hopefully it all gets taken care of but this is a bit of a trap game especially with our old offensive coordinator coming to town who knows how to gameplan for big games.

Final predictions (we're going to stop the score thing but god I hope we win)
High - 81
Low - 66
Wind - light 5 Mph gusts
Cloud cover - 75%
Rain - little to none (I'm gonna go with none)

GO HOKIES!!!!!!