Ticker for April 4, 2024

                
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April 4, 2024      April 4, 2024      April 4, 2024      April 4, 2024


This is war, eh?




I have an M.D. from Harvard, I am board certified in cardio-thoracic medicine and
trauma surgery, I have been awarded citations from seven different medical boards
in New England, and I am never, ever sick at sea. However, I can't tell you what
the cloud cover is going to be like at the time of totality on Monday, April 8,
in southeast Oklahoma.

What I CAN do, however, is show you the latest model output trying to estimate
the cloud cover on that day. Of course, even with these numbers, the type of
clouds present is almost as important. Cirrus clouds vs. stratus clouds, rain
clouds vs. pleasant puffy clouds, Amazon vs. Apple clouds...with some you'll still
be able to see the show. At any rate, best root for Canada in this instance, eh?

Mother Nature is gonna do what she's gonna do, and the computer models are gonna
do what they're gonna do...and that's try and simulate the cloud cover for that
day and time. So there you go. The Pivotal Weather folks say of the Canadian
forecast model: "Its forecasts for cloud cover are the most nuanced and
realistic available on this page."

Of the American GFS model, they say "Its forecasts for cloud cover can tend to
overestimate coverage where the sky will only be partly cloudy, while its
precipitation forecasts are realistic and useful."

So we've got that going for us. But the American model output also adds the
nuance of thickness of that cloud cover, and maybe it doesn't look quite as
bad as the cloud COVERAGE?



At any rate ("at any rate" is what you say when you don't know what ELSE to
say), this is quite the complicated forecast with a storm system obviously
hanging around, fouling things up. We do need the rain, however, so if that
happens to foul up a once-in-a-generation celestial event, now that it at least
had some good associated with it??

Not only can I not forecast clouds, I can't grasp at straws very well either!

Gary McManus
State Climatologist
Oklahoma Mesonet
Oklahoma Climatological Survey
gmcmanus@mesonet.org