NUCAPS Soundings and a Tale of Two Air Masses

Sometimes, things don't work out the way you think they will.  The world of meteorology?  Well, do I REALLY need to state how different things can turn out?  Probably not.

So, today we initialized to the Jackson MS office with the through that better instability might develop in the swath of drier mid/upper level air entering portions of southern Mississippi. Here is a scene showing GOES-16 0.64 um imagery overlaid with partially transparent 10.34 um imagery and NUCAPS soundings (green, yellow, red dots).

An earlier blog post showed some sample soundings from this environment, and I'll show another here briefly for quick reference.  This NUCAPS sounding was taken from near Jackson, MS at ~1830 UTC, and was fairly representative of soundings in the area.  

 Meanwhile, here is another generally representative sounding from near Atlanta, GA at the same time...

Notice the much higher instability that was present generally in Georgia early this afternoon.  What has happened?  Well, there has been much more convection and impactful convective cells in central and northern Georgia so far today, with multiple tornado warnings.  the same goes for Alabama, but unfortunately, soundings were not really useful over much of Alabama due to the thick, more uniform cloud cover.

Next will be a post about some observations of gridded data in this region...stay tuned!

Kris W