If you live in the Midwest, you are probably pretty familiar with all the rain we’ve been getting the past few days. The low pressure system that has formed is one of the largest I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s centered just over Lake Michigan, and you can see clouds extending well up into Canada all the way down the east coast to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Yesterday it bottomed out just about 40 miles West of Mt. Pleasant. We had a 983mb pressure reading, which is the lowest pressure we’ve had here since before I started writing Seasonality. 🙂 The interesting thing about this system is that it’s not really moving much at all. Typically, low pressure systems will form to the West of us, and just move on through within a day or two. This one will probably hang around for 5-6 days. It’s centered over Lake Michigan right now, is expected to move down into Illinois and Ohio over the next day or two, and then perhaps come up North again. It’s forecasted to be dropping rain on and off here through the beginning of next week.
Here’s a screenshot of the storm in Seasonality. This shot also shows one of the cool new features I’ve added in version 1.3, a full radar image overlay. The National Weather Service started offering a high resolution US map with a composite of all the radar images. Now Seasonality uses that to generate a map, so it makes long-distance viewing much nicer with respect to precipitation. I just wish this feature could extend into Canada to show the rest of this storm (US radar sites reach just north of the US-Canada border as you can see in this image), or the rest of the world for that matter. Seasonality 1.3 is coming along slower than originally expected, but it has several new features. Expect an announcement around the end of this month.