On Jul 31, 11:24?am, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:43:15 -0700, Chuck Gould





wrote:
On Jul 31, 9:25?am, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:
patootie...

Lat/Lon of New York City

40.47N 73.6W

Lat/Lon of "Tropical Storm Chantal"

40.29N 62.7W

Damn - I didn't know New York City was in the tropics.

Who 'da thunk it?

It has to do with where the storm originated, skipper. :-)

It originated @ 36.1N 66.0W Skipper.

Which sure as hell ain't the tropics.

You guys just need more imaginative nomenclature. Out this way we get
winter storms that blow in from Hawaii. We call the phenomenon "The
Pineapple Express". They are tropical windstorms because they
originate in the tropics.

Um...I always thought the Pineapple Express was made your area of the
country a soggy, dull, barely habitable place to live. As in rain -
not necessarily because it was wind.

I always thought, and I could be wrong, that your winds came from the
Polar regions.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Prevailing winds and currents are the result of warm and cold air
circulating between the polar regions and the tropics, but there are
circular wind and current patterns in every ocean created by the
rotation of the earth. Normally, our winter winds come from the SSW
and bring wet weather. While the wind may have stared in the arctic,
by the time it gets here it's done a U-turn down by Hawaii and started
back north again. The warm tropical air explains why our winters are
so much milder than inland locations at similar latitudes, only a few
days below freezing here in a typical winter- (but only a few days
above 85 or so in a typical summer).

Our dry winds do tend to be northerlies, with the rare downslope
easterly creating the very unusual burst of 95-100 degree
temperatures.
More of our summer winds are northerlies- unless it's raining or going
to rain (common conditions, both) and in that case the wind swings
around from the south most of the time.

There are some Puget Sound communities north of the Convergence Zone
that experience localized wet winds from the north. In those cases,
the wind has been blocked by the Olympic Mountains and a local
subcurrent spills south from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The major
airflow for stormy weather, however, remains SSW to NNE overall.

Winds directly from the arctic are very rare in this area.