Despite the tornado watch, we haven’t had a tornado warning this afternoon in Middle Tennessee. There have been several warnings just across the Alabama border, so we’ll have to stay on our toes this evening. Walking outside this afternoon in Nashville reminded me of living on the wind-swept plains of the Upper Midwest (Sioux Falls is lovely this time of year, by the way.) Gusty winds are causing a few problems across the mid-state: in the comments section of an earlier entry, Brad Foster mentioned some damage to his home in Cookeville. Here’s a link to current Middle Tennessee weather observations. SE22G29 would be a southeast wind sustained at 22 mph and gusting to 29 mph.
With Rita spinning off to our west, winds in nearly all levels of the atmosphere are blowing from the same direction (the south). Here’s a map of the Mid-South at the 850 millibar level from 7am CDT this morning. That’s about 5,000 feet up in the sky. On a clear and breezy day, a good forecast rule is to use the 850 mb wind speed as a rough estimate of your top wind gusts that afternoon. It’s a good thing that’s not the case today: the blue triangle over Nashville translates to 50 knots (58 mph)! Because of the cloud cover, we’re not mixing down as much of the atmosphere’s wind energy. Gusts across the area are still reaching around 40 mph at times.
