WInter Storm "Ulmer"

[ncngrr 8]

Colorado is expected to get hammered by "Winter Storm Ulmer", a "Bomb Cyclone", tomorrow.  Ulmer is expected to be an area of low pressure that will drop 24 to 30 millibars in less than 24 hours resulting in very high winds.  Ulmer is expected to set a new record for an area of low pressure in Colorado.  I just bought/installed Active Sky for P3Dv4 this past weekend and thought it might be a fun challenge to fly in eastern Colorado during the storm. 

[tttocs 301]

Yeah, this should get interesting over the next 12-24 hours.  In my part of the state the snow total predictions don't look that bad (and the whole thing is gonna start out as rain tonight), but the winds are really gonna make a mess of things out on the high plains once things shift to snow.  Keep a good thought for the folks of eastern Colorado tomorrow.

The mountains are already plagued by avalanches due to the extreme snow amounts over the last few weeks, but now the high plains get to share in the misery!

 

Scott

[Ron Attwood 3,465]

Does anyone ever remember these storm names? Aah, remember storm Gertrude? Now that was a storm! In the olden days every storm was called 'naughty word not allowed'.

 

EDIT: Blimey! I didn't think 'word definitely not allowed' would make it through. 😄

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

To me, the Weather Channel unofficially naming winter storms is like the International Star Registry naming a star after you in exchange for money.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

3 hours ago, ncngrr said:

Colorado is expected to get hammered by "Winter Storm Ulmer", a "Bomb Cyclone", tomorrow.  Ulmer is expected to be an area of low pressure that will drop 24 to 30 millibars in less than 24 hours resulting in very high winds.  Ulmer is expected to set a new record for an area of low pressure in Colorado.  I just bought/installed Active Sky for P3Dv4 this past weekend and thought it might be a fun challenge to fly in eastern Colorado during the storm. 

That is possibly the same storm that has been slowly leaving us here in Arizona today.  We had approx twenty hours of light rain with spurts of heavier rain and I could feel the drop in air pressure on my body, still very sensitive after my being run over more than a week ago.  I would not dare fly in such weather.  This winter has been the coldest and rainiest in Arizona in decades, and begs the question whether we might tip into an ice age due to global warming and meltwater cooling the oceans.  Our earth is a complex machine and even the butterfly effect can change the course of the climate.  I am so happy I live in Arizona as we are generally sheltered from extremes of cold, and once you have lived here as long as I have, you can play golf, ride a bicycle, or do any activity even at 115 degrees or the 118 degrees I experienced once as long as you wear a cap and give your forehead some shade.  But we light sport and UL pilots do not go up in the summertime, too much desert chop and thermals!

[Bob Scott 7,721]

NWS Blizzard Warning with 8" of snow driven by 70 mph winds in my forecast on the Colorado Front Range starting tomorrow morning.

Not to fear, my generator is big enough to power my computer and my Espresso machine.  ☕

 

[Bob Scott 7,721]

It was a butt-kicker, all right. 

KDEN and KCOS were both completely closed, with something like 1300 flight cancellations at Denver.  Colorado Springs airport recorded a gust of 96 knots, there were about 4 hours of horizontal snow with steady-state winds over 50 knots gusting to near 80, I-25 was closed both ways for over 18 hours, and they had to call out the National Guard to rescue over 500 stranded motorists who apparently lack the reading comprehension skills to understand the words "do not travel" in a NWS blizzard warning (which was issued 36 hours before the storm materialized).  Sadly, a Colorado State Trooper was struck and killed while assisting one of the aforementioned stranded drivers.

I have 3 foot high snow drifts in the driveway, but running a snowblower through big drifts is almost as fun as hot-rodding in a zero-radius lawnmower!  😉

 

[tttocs 301]

Someone asked me this morning - "How much snow did you get?".  Frankly, I have no idea.  Some places are bare, some are buried under feet of snow.  In any case, most of the snow on the ground originally fell somewhere near Cheyenne, WY anyway - the wind was prodigious with hours of whiteout conditions. 🙂

At least we never lost power.  A lot of folks did, and many of them still don't have any.

Scott

[Drumcode 1,893]

Meh, it wasn't this bad, I've seen worse. Moved to Colorado from Chicago last year. 🙂

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I saw a storm like this just once, in 1980, in the SF Bay area when we had 75 mph winds and it was called the Pineapple express back then, curling up like a hurricane with an almost visible eye.  And the eye passed right over Napa where I lived, the winds calmed, then picked up from the other direction.  We had no cable TV then and I had always wished my Dad would have pointed the Antenna towards Sacramento as I got bored of the SFO stations.  The storm gave me my wish, it turned our Antenna towards Sacramento and until they returned home, I since I lived alone with them had the Sacto stations, and I loved their programming schedule as they had my fav shows on earlier than the SFO stations so they could compete with them.

Before cable people bought antenna rotors, but we bought one way too late.

And I feel there is a relationship between earthquakes and storms like that, my parents were in Pineapple land at that time, in Hawaii which I have seen just once.  I was watching Johnny Carson on a Sacto channel when suddenly the floor literally dropped from under me and I felt weightless as I heard kind of a silent rumble which I could not describe.  I phoned my brother and grandma in sequence to ask if they felt it, and my grandma said yes she had, she lived in a trailer and it was one of the series of Livermore Earthquakes we had that year, she said she felt like she was bounced around in a Coca Cola can going over Niagra falls, and she had to have her trailer resettled on its ground moorings the next day, because it had a list.

My oldest brother also felt it and drove over to make sure I was mentally OK....  Nine years later I was blasted again in Napa by the great Loma Prieta Earthquake, and I do recall they played "We will rock you" by Queen during our Bay Bridge world series...

So these weather events always make me wonder, does the low air pressure release surface pressure on the ground, will Utah and the Wasatch mountains have their predicted earthquake?  Or Colorado at the foot of the Rockies...  I believe the opposite might happen and they will not, but beware false prophets like 'ol John.....  It is an inside joke with a sailor I met once, but he is not here on Avsim, he simply said the day before Loma Prieta happened that no bad earthquakes would ever happen in Cali to some tourists on our Tahoe sailboat.  I call it FIM disease, foot in mouth, knowing my foot has been in my mouth before here in the forums......

Edited March 15, 2019 by John_Cillis

[Mace 1,927]

Hurricane Rita in '06 or '07 gave us hurricane force sustained winds for about 2 hours.   That's not supposed to happen 300 miles inland.

So mother nature can really do a number on us sometimes.  Ulmer produced a tornado at Paducah, KY, which isn't too far from me.  We had a lot of wind and branches down but no tornado.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

2 hours ago, Mace said:

Hurricane Rita in '06 or '07 gave us hurricane force sustained winds for about 2 hours.   That's not supposed to happen 300 miles inland.

So mother nature can really do a number on us sometimes.  Ulmer produced a tornado at Paducah, KY, which isn't too far from me.  We had a lot of wind and branches down but no tornado.

Napa California, California in general, is/are not supposed to get Tornadoes.  In the spring of 1980 my Dad and I went to golf at Little Knoll golf course in SW Napa, just off of highway 12 on a nice warm humid clear day.  No bad weather was forecast but we had not seen the forecast.  About the fifth hole, the longest on the course, I noticed we started getting a lot of cumulus build up, in minutes.  About the seventh hole it began to get blustery and we heard thunder.  It was a nine hole course and to complete our eighteen, we teed up again at the first hole and I heard a roaring train. 

My muddied brain thought about it a second and realized the closest tracks were four miles distant, over the Napa River.  Then we were surrounded by the funnel of a F0/F1 Tornado and I could hear nothing, the roar was so loud.  I ran for shelter, the clubhouse, about 30 yards away but never made it.  I felt my body pelted by limbs and small dust as if they were fired from a shotgun, my father nowhere nearby. 

It was over in about 30 seconds and I gathered my senses, in shock but unhurt.  I turned around to see my gaping father at the first tee, turned around again to see the gaping club owner staring at me and then to his left, where a 100 foot pine tree had been uprooted and broken into thousands of pieces scattered between the first to third greens.  He looked at me in shock and said what happened, and I said "I am from the midwest and I hate to tell you this, but your course has been almost destroyed by a Tornado"...  Then my father said I unknowingly ran right into the center of the funnel and he was certain I was going to be carried aloft like Elijah into the heavens. 

My father and I, before the Tornado, had been debating on whether we'd play out the nine holes we were allotted because the course had been crowded that day.  But right after the Tornado, the surviving golfers (fortunately all of us) had their beer at the nineteenth hole, and sped off scared to death by what had happened.  My father and I looked at each other and to the astonishment of our friends the club owners, we played out our game, but we could not putt on the greens from the first to sixth holes--they were covered in debris.

The golf course replaced the fallen tree with a sand trap, the clubhouse lost some roof covering, as well as some out buildings, and we could see the path of the Tornado, which traveled from the Northwest to Southeast that day.  It never made the news but it made me know that something up there watches over me, like I just learned when I was run over two weeks ago.  What my purpose still is, having already finished my career and raised a child, I do not know.  I have had a life of near death experiences and somehow they make me more relaxed and less fearful the more they have happened, because I have not sought them.

[birdguy 3,943]

Down here in Roswell NM we just got the wind, no precip.  I checked on WndyT and our sustained winds at noon were 42 with gusts to 65,  Two minutes later our power went out.  It was restored about 7 PM.  That low was wound up pretty tight.

Noel