As I was sitting at a red light on Kimberly Road in Davenport yesterday afternoon, the guy in the Toyota next to me gave me a weird look. I was alone in my car shaking my fist at the sky.
Yesterday’s forecast called for clearing skies and warming temperatures. Boy, was I wrong!
Now you may be asking yourself, “Why is this guy pointing out the fact that he’s wrong?” Please refer to my post back in November about the “You’ve got the only job where you get paid to be wrong” people.
So, here’s why I was wrong. We started the morning with a pretty thick, low-level stratus cloud deck. Temperatures under the clouds were in the lower 30s in the morning. While common sense told me that the sun would burn off the clouds (as it usually does), we developed too much warm air in the 5,000-7,000 foot altitude. When you have warm air on top of cold, it’s called an inversion. And that inversion caused the clouds to stick around. As the sun set last night, the inversion went away and the clouds departed…right around 4pm. But that was too little, too late to warm us up.
We’ll have better luck today because we’re already starting with clearer conditions. Enjoy! -Meteorologist Eric Sorensen
