The most direct way to find your question is to search for the name you used when you submitted it (first name, last name or both). If you did not include a name, then you can search using keywords from your question. Of course, since many weather-related terms are common to a lot of the questions we receive, this may turn up a number of others in addition to your own.

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Answer: While we don't include a wind chill reading or map in every weather segment or forecast, when the wind chill is especially notable or is expected to be in a dangerous range we do include maps showing the wind chill readings or mention how low the wind chills may dip during the upcoming day or night. In addition, on our web page for "Current Conditions," at www.wral.com/weather/page/1005691/, we include the currently observed wind chill value any time the combination of wind speed and temperature falls within the valid range for wind chill computations.
Feb. 10, 2012 | Tags: apparent temperature, cold, winds, wral.com

Answer: Well, this has certainly been a warm winter so far, relative to the long-term averages, but having warm weather from time to time in January may be a little more common than you remembered through the course of your life. We took a look at the last 20 years of data for the Raleigh-Durham airport, and in that stretch there have been seven times that January featured 10 days or more with a high temperature of 60 degrees or greater, including 14 days that warm in both 2005 and 2006. As for days reaching 70 or warmer in January, there have been three years with 5 or more days reaching that level, including 10 times in the month of January 2005.

Feb. 9, 2012 | Tags: past weather, records/extremes

Answer: You're correct that the NWS is in the midst of adding dual-polarization (or polarimetric) capability to their network of Doppler radars - in fact, a number of them have already been installed, including the Morehead City radar in North Carolina. WRAL upgraded to a polarimetric system when we installed the Dual Doppler 5000 radar in 2007.

You can see a series of maps of recent and near-future NWS deployments of dual-pol radar, and the associated geographical coverage, at www.roc.noaa.gov/WSR88D/PublicDocs/DualPol/DPstatus.pdf.
Feb. 8, 2012 | Tags: cool sites, weather radar

Answer: There are a couple of places you can check. First, the National Climatic Data Center maintains a searchable database of severe weather reports that includes hail. You can go to www4.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-win/wwcgi.dll?wwEvent~Storms, select the state and your own county (or all counties in the state to check for nearby hail storms that may have been related), and a range of dates to check. You will get a list of reports by date, with locations that can be clicked for more details. This database tends to have about a three-month lag time, so be sure to consider whether the most current information covers the time frame you're interested in.

Another place to look is on the Storm Reports page of the Storm Prediction Center web site at www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/online/. It is usually quite up to date, and you can select any date in the past several years to see a map and list of severe reports. The maps indicate hail reports with green marks. If you know roughly when the damage happened, you can put that date in and quickly use links to the previous day or next day and step forward or back to see when a cluster of hail reports show up near your location.
Feb. 7, 2012 | Tags: cool sites, hail, past weather, severe weather

Answer: It was not, but it was high up on the list of warmest Decembers. At the Raleigh-Durham airport, which has records going back to 1944, we find it was the 4th warmest on record, with a mean temperature of 48.5 degrees, which is 5 degrees above normal.

Another reporting station in Raleigh that has records available since 1892 ended up with a mean monthly temperature of 48.0 degrees, which was the 9th warmest December on record at that site. For both locations, the warmest December on record was 1956, which had a mean temperature of 51.0 degrees at RDU and 52.5 for the other site (located in west Raleigh).
Feb. 6, 2012 | Tags: heat, past weather, records/extremes

Answer: We didn't get any reports to that effect, but it may have possible for you to see a pillar that day, as there were some cirrus clouds reported in the area at the time. If the clouds and surrounding air contained some horizontally oriented plate-like ice crystals for the sun to reflect off off the bottom of the plates, a pillar could have been visible. Another possibility may have been a crepuscular ray that happened to have been unusually isolated and upward-pointing in a similar direction as a pillar would. You can read more about both phenomena at www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/pillar.htm, optics.kulgun.net/SunPillar/, and www.atoptics.co.uk/atoptics/rayim1.htm.
Feb. 5, 2012 | Tags: atmospheric optics, clouds

Answer: Those months were a little less windy at the RDU airport than the long-term average, actually. For December 2011, the mean wind speed was 5.2 mph, compared to a long-term average of 7.4 mph. The highest sustained wind speed during the month was 30 mph on the 27th, with the highest gust being 44 mph on the same day.

In January, we had a mean wind speed for the month of 6.6 mph, compared to a long-term average of 8.0 mph. The highest sustained speed for January was 31 mph on the 27th, while there was a gust to 44 mph on the 17th.
Feb. 4, 2012 | Tags: normals, winds

Answer: You can click the Almanac link from our main weather page to get started. At the resulting page, look for the "Get historical data" form, where you can enter any date you're interested in (including the current day). The page that loads will show you data from the RDU airport, and scrolling down a bit you will find graphs of several variables, including pressure. You can get a sense of how pressure varied during the day just by looking over the graph, or you can scroll down and look for hourly values in the pressure column for more exact figures. You can also view the data in weekly or monthly format to see graphs of how pressure varies over those longer periods.
Feb. 3, 2012 | Tags: past weather, weather & health

Answer: That strikes us as a bit too much of a blanket statement regarding how the lake water temperature would respond to rain. There area some complications involved regarding exactly where the water temperature is being measured, how strong the winds are, how much water is running into and out of the lake via streams or rivers, etc, but if we hold all else the same and just consider rain falling into the lake water from above, the response of the the lake water temperature should depend on the initial temperature of the lake water (and how that temperature varies with depth), the temperature of the raindrops that fall into it, the volume of rain drops that enter the lake, and how deeply the rainwater mixes with the lake water. Depending on those variables, rain falling into a lake should be able to raise the lake water temperature, lower it, or leave it about the same as it was. When measuring temperature changes in the water, you also have to consider how the lake temperature may be responding to changes in air temperature and surrounding ground temperatures, and heating or cooling via radiation (daytime sunshine, for example) and condensation or evaporation.
Feb. 2, 2012 | Tags: lakes and rivers, rain

Answer: The formation of lightning depends on strong upward and downward motions that are typically associated with unstable air. The instability is produced by a combination of temperatures that cool rapidly with increasing height, and by rather humid air in the lower atmosphere. During the warmer parts of the year, especially Spring and Summer, there tends to be warmer air near the surface due to strong solar heating, and also because of the warmer temperatures more water vapor tends to be present in the air near the surface due to higher evaporation rates from the ground, lakes, rivers and so on.

When we are in the winter months, the ground is frequently rather cool and the air near the surface is often rather dry, so that the air is more stable and much less prone to produce the updrafts that result in lightning. In addition, storms systems that produce significant snow in our area are often characterized by low pressure moving northeast across the region, with warmer air being drawn in from the south and east on the east side of the low (where rain often occurs, along with an occasional thunderstorm) and cold air being drawn southward on the north and west sides, where most of the snow occurs.

While all of this leads to lightning being much more common with rain than with snow, it is not an absolute distinction. On rare occasion, a very intense storm system, or one with a very cold pocket of air aloft, may induce strong convective updrafts while it is cold enough for snow to reach the ground, resulting in the formation of snow and some lightning at the same time, often called a "thunder snow." It can be an jarring juxtaposition, having the quiet beauty of the snowfall interrupted by the bright flashes of lightning and the crashes or rumbles of thunder that follow.

Feb. 1, 2012 | Tags: general meteorology, snow, thunderstorms