WEATHER: Last Crack At Bat
![Illustration: Rain Delay at Baseball Game by Victor Grigas - Own work, [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/599529_9594abdf568d4baa91ae396ff428517c~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_653,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/599529_9594abdf568d4baa91ae396ff428517c~mv2.jpg)
Illustration: Rain Delay at Baseball Game by Victor Grigas - Own work, [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia
Last Friday was heard in the hills of Jerusalem the crack of the bat — again. I wasn't there because I was working on finishing my paper on forecasting snow. I figure the harder I work the more likely it is to snow this winter (preferably here).
Why was the crack of the bat heard again? Because while it did get cooler and there were periods of rain, it was really more like the weather of yore, rather than the weather of fore. There was a fairly nice rain (about a 1/4 of an inch) and it was accompanied by the loudest booms heard here since the last "real" Gaza war — only it was the real thing instead of those "fake" hydrometeors (i.e., missiles) that came our way then (for some, since then and far too often).
It's actually a good thing I didn't make it to the game. It turns out that my right field chit chat partner hit a line drive home run to right field that I believe I mistook (from my window) as a crack of thunder. As I said, it's good that I didn't come. Had I come, I am afraid that he would have never even seen the ball that spun into his bat's sweet spot and then soared over the fence. I would have seen that pitch and who knows where it would have gone.
It was that kind of weather. It felt like we were turning towards winter, but really the atmosphere was more like a Florida summer day or a New York summer day — just not as hot. That's what enabled the formation of afternoon (even deadly) thunderstorms, some of which caused severe flooding in the Jordan Valley, including Jordan itself. For my daughters, though, it was a chance to get excited about what we used to take for granted growing up in NY — rain!
Well all that really was chit-chat.
But what is coming our way is not. One might call it January weather in November, but others will just say that's how it used to be. It's a real winter storm complete with a soaking rain that should last several days, strong winds, hail, lightning/thunder, and probably some flooding to go along with it.
Tuesday will probably feel a bit balmy as winds blow from the south but Wednesday should turn sharply cooler as a storm moves east of Cyprus. Before it can exit, another storm should drop down from the west as we head into Shabbat, moisture should fill in at all levels of the atmosphere, and the rain should continue.
At the moment, we don't see any exit for this run of rainy, stormy days, and alas — we may have truly heard the last "crack" until springtime.
Image credit: The Jerusalem Herald
Dr. Lynn is a lecturer at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Earth Sciences Department. He is also CEO of Weather It Is, LTD, a company that specializes in reducing weather risk. Click here to read more of this writer’s work in The Jerusalem Herald.
