Weather post by Ryan Maue
Wichita, Kansas was hit with a thunderstorm induced “heat burst” early Thursday morning, with the temperature jumping from the mid-80s up to 102F after midnight!
Wichita has now experienced the earliest string of 7-straight 100F+ days (so far) this June.
What is a heat burst?
From theweatherprediction.com:
A heat burst is a downdraft of hot and dry air that typically occurs in the evening or overnight hours. A heatburst is much more rare than a severe thunderstorm. Thus, the atmospheric conditions have to be just right for a heat burst to occur. Heat bursts usually happen in the evening or at night after thunderstorms are ending. Thus, a thunderstorm has a vital role. Two other characteristics are that the air must start its descent from fairly high up and the environmental air aloft needs to be very dry. Precipitation falling into very dry air aloft will cause the air to cool through latent heat absorption. If the air is very high aloft and the air is much more dense than the surrounding air then it will accelerate toward the surface. In the case of a heat burst, all the precipitation that cooled the air aloft has been vaporized. Therefore, the precipitation can no longer absorb latent heat. As this dense air accelerates toward the surface it rapidly warms at a dry adiabatic lapse rate compression. What must make a heat burst so rare is that this downdraft must reach extremely high velocities. Velocities must be high enough so that the momentum of the sinking air offsets the fact that it is becoming warmer in temperature and thus less dense than the environmental air it is falling into.
Not only is the air in a heat burst anomalously hot but it is also extremely dry. The extremely high temperatures combined with extremely dry air plus the wind can remove all the moisture out of vegetation. Just like any atmospheric phenomena, heat bursts have differing intensities. The worst heat bursts persist for a significant amount of time and have temperatures that go over 120 F, even in the middle of the night. This extremely hot and dry air can remain in place for several hours before temperatures return to normal.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Interesting read. Unfortunately, here in Australia this weather event is not being reported in such a balanced, or even factually correct way. An underlying AGW spin is still detectable in the newscasts.
I take that last bit of my first post back. AGW *IS* being firmly fingered for the increase in heatwaves, bush fires, floods, snows and…tornados in the US.
Wow..!!! Hopefully no one lights a match out there in farm country. I am sure everyone is awake right now wondering what the heck just hit them. Also there is a Solar mass ejection coming toward earth but I don’t think the two events are related in any way.
Nice snippet of information. Thanks, Ryan.
Well wait until morning and it will be reported everywhere that global warming is trying to kill us all even with the temperature is dropping as we speak.
Incredible! I lived in Wichita for 13 years, but never experienced something like this. Hope the vegetation really is OK, considering the effect heat bursts can have (see the article).
That’s really “cool,” I don’t think I’ve heard of a heat burst before. To be left with a column of hot buoyant air above you, the air pressure ought to drop, and indeed, Wunderground traces show the effect quite nicely. Interestingly, the pressure drops before the heat reaches the ground, another indication that downward momentum is vital.
Start at http://www.wunderground.com/US/KS/Wichita/KICT.html . After the airport data, there’s a table of Wunderground’s members’ stations, click on some that have sensible looking data, then look at the daily plots of weather data.
E.g. http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KKSGODDA2 shows the temp hit 95 with a dew point of 30. (All temps F 102°F is 39°C according to my mental math.)
http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KKSWICHI41 is an overall warmer spot. Bad calibration? More like it’s just in town and has UHI. They hit 102, and dew point 26 a few minutes before. The dew point is likely wrong, it’s derived from the relative humidity and air temp, and the humidity sensor is slow to respond. 5-10 minutes after the 102 temp, the dew point was records as 34, I think that’s more likely. Still remarkably dry for the region – 10% relative humidity in the middle of the night!
Heat bursts – Another kernel of knowledge courtesy WUWT. Thanks, Ryan.
Could instability created by heating a patch of the upper atmosphere with, say, 3 billion watts of radio energy cause such rapid vertical displacement?
Here in the NE we’ve been hearing about this horrible hot weather… in June… but oddly all the record high temps are STILL from the 1930s and 40s despite decades of “unprecedented” heat.
Anyhow, what a weird phenomenon. Don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing one of these.
Jeff’s 13 years notwithstanding, this kind of heat is common in Kansas. I recall such heat waves as a child. My Dad told of a day in his childhood when two alcohol thermometers broke from the heat, one of them under a shade tree. His father said he remembered even higher heat.
I’m in Oklahoma City these days, and it has not been hot here yet. At least not to me. We almost made it to 100°F a couple of days ago, but when I was outside, I kept noticing how cool the breeze was for such a warm day.
The central and southern plains of the US are known for extremes. Oklahoma’s native son ,Will Rogers, popularized the notion that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute. Yes, we have extremes. Just this past winter within 100 miles we had a five day span where temperature went from the high 70s to the double digit negative readings and back. A swing of more than 100°F! There are no oceans near. Our lakes are relatively small. We do not have the moderation of water, just our red dirt. (Of course, Kansas has some of the richest black dirt in the world.)
Extremes of cold, heat, wind, drought, flood, we have it all. I suppose growing up with less extremes makes one more susceptible to it all. There is no cause for alarm. The Kansans have survived worse.
BTW, check the Wichita, KS, weather stations. Intersting graphs, but the heat was only about an hour. I bet most residents will never know it happened. Warm 70s this morning. Quite ordinary.
Also, this was posted on the Weather Underground page:
… On this date in weather history…
In 1953… it was meteorological mayhem in Massachusetts
when the worst tornado in the history of New England tore
across the state. The F4 beast… which some believe may
have been an F5… possessed a track 46 miles
long… averaged three quarters of a mile wide… lasted 1
hour and 24 minutes and obliterated everything in its
path. Hardest hit was Worcester where… 40 miles west of
Boston… the tornado reached 1 mile wide. In all 90 were
killed… of which 60 were in Worcester… 1,288 injured
and around $52 million damage resulted; the 2002
equivalent of nearly $350 million! Debris from the
tornado landed in Boston and adjacent areas of the
Atlantic. At the time… it was the costliest tornado in
United States history.
Which reminds us there is nothing unusual about tornadoes this year.
Clearly this is not weather but Climate.
I wasn’t awake when this happened, but it definitely seemed weird to me when I went outside this morning and there was not a trace of rain left anywhere. Even tall grass at my farm is completely dry, down to the ground. Interesting read. Thank you.
Customer of ours just came in and told us his tomato plants and spinach plants are all brown. Yesterday he was in and these plants were thriving. So much for fresh veggies. Said his neighbor’s had large tree branches and such down in his yard. Grass was brown also. So guess the heat burst took all that moisture out.
I live in Wichita and it’s been very hazy the last few days as well as hot. The local weatherman said the haze is due to the jet stream blowing in the smoke from the fires in Arizonia.
Sir, you are a kind and well-meaning man with many facts, but there will be an AGW beating. Everyone knows this is simply a hot pocket of CO2 created by the Haliburton extreme weather machine controlled by conservatives. And attempts to prove otherwise is proof of denialist thinking. Just follow the examples of Mitt Romney and Chris Christie and surrender, you fools. Even the conservative energy scribe Steve Hawyard recently tells us to forget debating the science and debate what should be done if CAGW were true. (Not exactly original or successful.)
US conservatives appear to be having their own Winning The Future mental seizures.
Strange. Being two hrs east, it is warm here now. I would’ve hated being there last night. Well, better them than me!!!
I can just see it now……global warming tries to kill us in our sleep!!!!
I live in Wichita. There was no thunderstorm associated with this “event”! It has been hot and dry and very windy. This general weather 100F happens frequently in July and August. It’s about a month early this year. After the 1AM “event” the temperature went back to normal (80) quickly. The one thing I have noticed lately is that sometimes the radar shows light rain, but none seems to be reaching the ground.
My mother experienced something like this in 1934 in western Kansas..
She had in her diary that it went up form the mid 70’s to 100+ in minutes.
So this is nothing new…
We live near McConnell AFB, and were right in the midst of the damaging winds associated with the ‘heat burst’ . We have several 4×4 fence posts that were snapped, tree limbs down all over the neighborhood, and broken windows. When it happened, it set off car alarms all over the subdivision. When we went outside last night to look around at the damage, it was 102 degrees at 1 in the morning. No rain at all though.
At 1 am it was 88 here in the thumb of michigan. I don’t recall the last time we have seen temps that high during evening hours. The humidity was below 40%
Low altitude volcano plumes nearer the equator. Stratosphere honkers nearer to polar regions. Sharp, sharp temperature gradients. Earth is a perturbed tornado factory.
Thanks Ryan,
Very interesting. I’ve lived here on the Southern Plains (Oklahoma) for more than thirty years and noticed that it sometimes heats up quite a bit after a thunderstorm, but never thought about why.
OK S.
Oh, dear. Another example of “global weirding”.
Global weirding being, actually, the Bill Shatner type: unusual, natural stuff we never knew before.
Interesting …
Harold Taft* details a ‘heat burst’ event in a book he co-authored In 1975 with fellow KXAS meteorologist Ron Godbey titled “Texas Weather”.
A summary of that event I can locate the book …
I sincerely loved Harold’s common sense forecasts, his hand-drawn wx maps (pre-automation/computerization days), and his ‘deviation’ from the party NWS ‘line’ with his own prognostication/weather forecast when warranted.
Classic Harold Taft with Chip Moody showing off some old weather tools.
PS Harold, we miss your humor and your wx insight. May you R.I.P.
* “Harold Ernest Taft Jr. (September 5, 1922 – September 27, 1991), affectionately known as “The World’s Greatest Weatherman” and “The Dean of TV Meteorologists”, was the first television meteorologist west of the Mississippi River and held the post for a record 41 years.”
Per: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Taft
.