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I like to rank things. This likely comes from my love of sports, but I like to rank anything from my favorite meteorologists to Tweets of the week to, in this case, weather events. Much like in sports, there are great debates amongst meteorologists about the greatest events of all time. Each year, we tend to rank the top 10 events of that year, even.
And most have different events. And most have different events for the different seasons. Top winter events, summer events, heat events, rain events, etc. The lists and divisions of lists can go on and on. However, nothing can touch one’s top 5 events (unless, of course, a better event occurs). In light of this, I’ll give you my top 5 events for Kentucky as a whole. As a disclaimer: these aren’t my top five overall events, but just the ones for Kentucky.
#5 May 10, 2016 Tornado Outbreak
This one has snuck into my top 5 while reviewing and contemplating it a lot recently. This is an event that fascinates me because a) I did an incredibly poor job of forecasting it, b) it had very weak synoptic signals in any of the guidance and c) it produced a tornado outbreak across the western half of the state, including an EF-3 across far western Kentucky.
The day started off with rain across the region, which was one of the major mesoscale features that laid the foundation for supercells to develop across the state that afternoon. Additionally, a very intense, high precipitation supercell developed across the northwestern portion of the state, and as the supercell moved eastward, it laid an outflow boundary just out ahead of it to spark off additional severe thunderstorms.
The day ended up with 7 total tornadoes across the state, and worked its way into my meteorological heart as an event that I respect, and will do plentiful research on in the future.
#4 March 4-5, 2012 Snow Event
This is an event that I actually did research on, and is one of the most unique weather events that I have ever experienced in my whole life. This was the same weekend of the March 2, 2012 tornado outbreak, and while that was a meteorological feat in itself, this snow event was just as interesting from a meteorological standpoint as the tornado outbreak was.
I did my semester paper for my Forecasting class last semester on this event, and it was fascinating to find what I did. The event was not necessarily obvious from a synoptic standpoint, but when dug into a bit, it becomes fairly obvious. First of all, the March 2nd event had ushered in a very deep 500 mb trough. This set the area up within northwesterly flow, and this was favorable as a sharp shortwave trough at 500, 700 and 850 mb dove southeastward towards the region.
This shortwave was one of the keys to developing a surface low that would slide across the southern portions of the state. To its north, a tight 850 mb temperature gradient developed nearly orthogonal to the flow at that level. This intensified the warm air advection across the region. In addition to this, a strong 500 mb vorticity maximum rotated southeastward through the region, and ahead of that was a positive vorticity maximum anomaly across the region. This, plus the strong warm air advection across us, created strong vertical motion across the region. There were other things that developed the event itself, but these were the biggest synoptic features that helped develop the system.
#3 The February 5-6, 2008 Squall Line
This event is one of my favorite events to go back and study meteorologically. The event was of incredible magnitude in instability and wind shear for the time of year, and this yielded an incredible event as a whole.
It is hard to like an event that was as devastating as this one was, however. It was the cause of 57 fatalities across the south, and millions of dollars in damage. Several supercells produced very long tracked tornadoes across the southeast, including one that tracked into Allen County, KY.
As a brief overview of what happened meteorologically, this event was very synoptically evident, even in the long range. The SPC did an excellent job, having a very accurate area outlined six days in advance of the event itself. The atmospheric flow for the event itself was very strong, with significant shear being noted across much of the southeastern US.
Additionally, the progression of the 500 mb shortwave trough forced a surface low across the Rockies the days before. This created a large warm sector across the southeastern US, allowing for broad and deep moisture return. This created a very unseasonably unstable environment, with 60°F and greater dewpoints advecting into the lower Ohio Valley.
This event was one of the worst in the past decade in terms of societal impact, but meteorologically, it was fascinating.
#2 The 2009 Ice Storm
Ahh, the 2009 ice storm.
This was arguably the worst natural disaster in state history, with thousands and thousands of trees being destroyed across the state, and over 700,000 people being without power at the peak of the storm. There were people in isolated portions of the state that were without power for over three weeks, as well!
I won’t get too into the details meteorologically on this one, as it would take quite a bit to get into. However, the atmosphere was anomalously moist, there was an incredible amount of synoptic forcing and a stationary front across the region in which moisture flowed overtop of, and gave us the large amounts of precip that we saw. This overrunning pattern created a warm layer over the region, and this is what led to our freezing rain.
I’ll never forget this event, as it was (that I can remember) the first time I was out of school for a week. Looking at it meteorologically now, though, it was much more amazing than that.
#1 The March 4-5, 2015 Winter Storm
Ding, ding, ding! This is absolutely at the top and it isn’t even remotely close.
There are certain atmospheric phenomena that make me click. Jet streak dynamics, QG Theory, severe weather dynamics, etc (basically, everything that has to do with mid-latitude meteorology). This basically had everything to do with the first two.
This was a long duration event, and allowed me to produce what was likely my best forecast post that I have ever had here at WxOrNotBG. It started off with intense rainfall and flooding across much of the day, and a cold front was gradually moving southward across the state, advecting in a very cold environment into the region. Sustaining this precipitation was one of the staples of jet streak dynamics: the right entrance region of the mid and upper level jet streaks.
I can’t tell you how much I love this event to be honest. Look at those jet streaks, and how perfectly placed we are within the right entrance region of those jet streaks. This favors upward vertical motion across the region, and within a strong jet streak like in both of the 300 and 500 mb jet streaks, the upward motion is going to sustain intense precip across the region.
While QG diagnostics weren’t very strong, there were several positive vorticity advection maximums that rotated through the region throughout this event, helping to force and sustain heavy precipitation across the lower Ohio Valley. All of this met up with an anomalously moist environment relative to the temperatures across the region and created the very intense precip that we saw.
There were many other things I could get into with this event, but I won’t for time’s sake. This event was truly a special event, and was on a level that is very rarely matched across the state. For the meteorology behind it, it should be appreciated. For everything else, you can hate it.
Those are my top 5 events of my lifetime in Kentucky! What are your alls? You can tweet @WxOrNotBG or comment below on what your favorite weather events in Kentucky are!