Last Thursday, we saw a round of severe thunderstorms develop and roll through the NYC area in the afternoon hours. My instructor (Steve Corfidi) and TA (Phil Lutzak) from my Penn State World Campus Weather Forecasting Certificate program noticed an noteworthy feature in satellite images of the event.

You can see that there’s an arcing, convex, wave-like feature oriented southwest-northeast that sweeps east across the Northeast in the visible satellite loop above. If you’re having trouble spotting it check out the series of annotated images below that marks the leading edge of this feature in different points along its progression.

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Professor Corfidi noted that this feature seemed to line up well with an area of drier air at the mid-upper levels of the atmosphere, which he picked up in the infrared Channel 8 satellite images. For reference, I’ve superimposed the IR channel on the visible satellite channel from the same time, which is also the 3rd frame of the gallery above.

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What’s more, referring back to the visible satellite loop above, it’s evident that this feature was also partially responsible for firing up strong to severe thunderstorms along the NJ/PA border that eventually tracked east over the NYC area. Storm reports from the day indicate that several of these storms produced damaging wind gusts.

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It’s evident there’s some causative relationship between this wave-like feature and the eruption of afternoon thunderstorms along its leading edge, and this all raises the question: what was this phenomenon? I did some investigation of various upper air analyses from the Storm Prediction Center and found that this phenomenon correlated well with two features at the upper levels of the atmosphere.

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First, we can see that there’s a swath of increased divergence noted at 300 mb (areas outlined in pink) that correlates somewhat with this area of drier mid-upper level air. The second image is perhaps even more convincingly linked to this phenomenon – showing an area of increased potential vorticity. But what does potential vorticity indicate about the atmosphere? In this case, potential vorticity indicates a lowering of the local tropopause – the boundary between the troposphere, where all our weather takes place, and the stratosphere above it. The stratosphere, relative to the troposphere is much drier, and this explains the source of the clear drier region picked up in the GOES Channel 8 infrared images.

In fact, there’s a known relationship between potential vorticity and water vapor satellite imagery:

There is a clear relation between PV (potential vorticity) and water vapour imagery. A low tropopause can be identified in the WV imagery as a dark zone. As a first approximation, the tropopause can be regarded as a layer with high relative humidity, whereas the stratosphere is very dry, with low values of relative humidity. The measured radiation temperature will increase if the tropopause lowers. This is because of the fact that the radiation, which is measured by the satellite, comes as a first approximation from the top of the moist troposphere. High radiation temperatures will result in dark areas in the WV imagery.

Colorado State University

Potential vorticity in this case was an indicator of increased divergence at upper levels, and this helps explain why severe thunderstorms initiated on the afternoon of Aug 21, 2019, despite the lack of a strong surface boundary providing convergence. This is because divergence and vorticity aloft helps induce convergence at the surface (and may have helped generate a prefrontal trough that day). Divergence aloft is essentially removing air from the top of the column, and since the atmospheric system always attempts to maintain a balance in terms of conservation of mass, momentum, etc, this air leaving the top of the column gets replaced by air flowing in at the surface. This is inflow of air results in convergence, and enhanced lift, as this air rises to replace the air that continues to be evacuated aloft. A source of lift is always a critical ingredient to any severe thunderstorm!