WHAT IS A MCS?
(A MCS over S.Dakota & Nebraska early morning 6/10/2010 click here for Radar image)
Written by: Brian Neudorff
In a comment on Scott's post from yesterday someone asked, "Is flooding a possibility this weekend if we receive a couple rounds of MCS?" Now if you don't follow weather a lot you may be asking, What is a MCS? A MCS is an acronym for Mesoscale Convective System. Let's break those terms down some.
Mesoscale - In basic terms it means medium size relative to all features on a weather map. When looking at the weather map you are looking at the synoptic-scale, all the highs, lows and fronts are part of the synoptic-scale. When we talk Mesoscale we are also looking at MCS as well as tropical waves and tropical storms. Horizontal dimensions generally range from around 50 miles to several hundred miles.
Convective - refers to convection, or showers and thunderstorms and their turbulent upward and downward air motions.
System - this is just describing what all these storms are doing and acting as a whole unit.
When you put all those together and in the simplest of terms a mesoscale convective system, or MCS, is simply a decent-sized and well-organized area of multiple thunderstorms. (If you want more of the scientific and technical explanation you can find t here here.) MCSs occur around the world, and, when over water and conditions are right, they can develop into tropical cyclones.
Some other examples of a MCS is the 1995 July Derecho that did widespread damage across western, northern and central New York with very strong destructive winds.
As Scott pointed out yesterday, we are going to be near the edge of this ridge and although you can commonly see these MCSs ride along these edges I think most of the MCS activity will stay to our west and to our south.
To answer the question about flooding, I don't think we will really see an MCS here so at this point I am not too worried about flooding but there are still major differences in the models and it will need to be watched.
Awesome breakdown, Brian. I didn't know that MCS's could lead to tropical cyclones, but that's pretty neat. Are the waves that come off Africa that can sometimes lead to hurricanes originally MCSs as they cross the west coast of Africa?
ReplyDeleteBTW, let's hope any possible MCS's or general thunderstorm activity stays out of our areas. We're pretty soaked right now...and especially out toward Buffalo where they've had over 5" at KBUF since June 1. I've got to imagine it won't take much more rain, especially if it falls in a short period of time, to cause possible flash and poor drainage flooding.
On the other hand, MCS's like to pulse up at night, so maybe we'll have a cool light show over Lake Ontario within the next few nights. I've officially issued a lightning over Ontario watch for the weekend lol.
I second that. My garden is water logged.
ReplyDelete