By Matt Souders

A Slack discussion: Learning to recognize a pattern for very up and down winds in the Columbia River Gorge

by Matt Sounders & Mike Godsey

windfind 4:36 PM

Here is a animation I am working on to help explain the UP AND DOWN winds today.  Even over the ocean at dawn you can see the instablity.

look at all of those vertical strat-cus west of the Cascades

there must be a lot of mid-level cool air

Notice reform clouds on eastern mountains

Luv how the marine layer clouds and wave clouds get wiped out.

they erode and are replaced by that garbage strat-cu

I really like how these animations allow you to review things over and over in motion.

very clearly replacing the cool stable layer with a cool unstable mid-level layer

yeah…these rocking animations are highly useful

Shud try to grab and compare Troutdale 7AM and 7 PM profiler and skew t

that could actually be pretty amusing

now you see the thin inversion…now you don’t!
alas, the models were way overestimating the thickness of the marine inversion on Monday/Tuesday for today so I expected today to be better for longer

very…very-weak top-of-boundary-layer inversion in the morning, then immediately wiped out by steep lapse rates in the midday period

Actually looking at the satellite more closely there was not much of marine layer over Troutdale

it looks very muted even on that profiler chart

what about Portland?
or Astoria

So even at dawn unstable air had moved to Troutdale.

so it would appear. :confused:

You can see it arriving at Astoria

no inversion at all

quite cold at the top of the boundary layer

This would make a good tutorial for Gorge mets. I will grab this conversation and imagery and put into a blog. Then you can add texts. Not all blogs have to be aimed at customers.  We can publish it just for internal use.

modeling as of late Monday had a little bit of an upper ridge over the NW US…instead it’s a little bit of an upper-trough

that makes a large difference

We have to get better at forecasting winds beyond the typical up and down.

new messages

the users are getting a bit savvier and have higher expectations these days