Keeping An Eye On The Tropics… – National Weather Outlook For June 16, 2023

by | Jun 16, 2023 | Weather

National Weather Forecast

On Friday, the frontal boundary responsible for heavy rain in the Southeast will still be in place, leading to more showers and storms. We’re also watching systems producing showers and storms in the Pacific Northwest, from the Great Basin to the Plains, and in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States. Some snow could mix in during the overnight and early morning hours in the Rockies. Meanwhile, the heat continues across parts of the Southern Plains, with 100s across Texas.

Heavy rain continues to fall across portions of the Southeastern United States through the first half of the weekend, with an additional 3-5”+ for some that could produce flash flooding. Scattered areas of heavier rain (possibly 2”+) will be possible across the Plains and in the Northeast as well.

Meanwhile, we are watching a wave coming off of Africa that has a low chance of formation as it moves westward through the weekend into next week. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one just to be safe!

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Dangerous fire weather conditions becoming more common across U.S.

More from Axios: “Fire weather days — featuring a volatile mix of low humidity, strong winds and high temperatures — have increased in number across much of the Lower 48 states during the past 50 years, a new analysis shows. The big picture: An analysis from Climate Central, a nonprofit climate science research organization, found that wildfire seasons are getting longer and more intense, especially in the West. Many parts of the East have also seen increases in fire weather days, the report finds. Why it matters: The trend in fire weather days demonstrates how climate change is altering risk levels at the local and regional levels, with much of the phenomenon tied to human-caused climate change, per Climate Central.”

An Unlikely Foe Is Slowing the Fight Against Wildfire Pollution

More from Heatmap: “Wildfire smoke is making air pollution in the United States a lot worse, as anyone in New York City last week can attest. Yet the regulatory tools that have done so much to reduce emissions from cars and smokestacks may actually be getting in the way of effectively managing forests in order to prevent massive, out of control fires. The increasing importance of wildfire smoke, and the structural policy changes required to fight it — from overhauling forestry practices to worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — may require a rethinking of how public policy is supposed to protect people from pollution. Catalytic converters in cars have visibly cleared the air even in the most traffic-jammed cities; getting rid of lead in gasoline has made children smarter; efforts to fight acid rain were so successful that the paucity of it is now seen as a reason to ignore current environmental problems. But all these efforts were aimed at limiting emissions from particular sources, like factories and vehicles, not fires that consume tens of thousands of acres across a mixture of federally managed and privately held land.”

A once-shuttered California mine is trying to transform the rare earth industry

More from Grist: “In arid southeastern California, just across the border from Nevada, sits the only large-scale rare earth element mine in the Western Hemisphere. Here at Mountain Pass, rocks are dug out of a 400-foot pit in the ground, crushed, and liquified into a concentrated soup of metals that are essential for the magnets inside consumer electronics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, or EVs. Today, that metallic soup is shipped to China, where individual rare earths are separated before being refined into metals and forged into magnets. But MP Materials, the company that took ownership of the 70 year-old Mountain Pass mine in 2017, hopes to change that. This quarter, MP Materials plans to begin separating rare earths at Mountain Pass — the first time this key processing step will have occurred in the United States since 2015.”

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– D.J. Kayser