WRAL.com: Raleigh, Durham, Fayetteville

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: Tornadoes can also vary considerably in the relationship between their width (and path length as well) and their intensity as rated on the enhanced Fujita damage scale, but there is an overall tendency for both width and path length to increase for increasing intensity. It would be quite rare for an EF5 tornado to have a width as narrow as a hundred yards, and one study of the relationship among those variables indicates that probably around 5% or fewer of F5 tornadoes would be that small. In that study, about 80% of F5 twisters had a width of less than half a mile, with the mean being a little over a third of a mile and the mean width of F4 tornadoes being a little less than a third of a mile. The one-mile wide monster EF4 and EF5 tornadoes make up a very small percentage of those that occur.
May. 22, 2013 | Tags: tornadoes

Answer: It would appear so based on pollen count trends from the NC Division of Air Quality. While there is still some residual pine pollen being picked up in measurements, the concentrations since roughly the end of April have been far below those seen during the peak of this year's eruption. From about a week into April until late in that month, tree pollen concentrations often ranged between 800 and 1700 grains per cubic meter. Since that time, the concentrations have varied some, but mainly between about 30 and 180 grains per cubic meter. You can see a chart that tracks tree, grass and weed pollen concentrations over the past three months or so at xapps.enr.state.nc.us/aq/PollenServlet.
May. 21, 2013 | Tags: cool sites, pollen

Answer: The older Flash-based version of iControl was re-coded using HTML5 in order to improve its consistency across multiple computing platforms and operating systems. Our web staff attempted to maintain all the features of the previous version with a couple of new features thrown in, so it really should be able to do all the older version did, including grabbing the map and panning it around, along with being able to zoom in and out, etc. We have a blog post that introduces the new version and describes in a nutshell how to operate it. That post is located at www.wral.com/icontrol-radar-gets-an-update/12390007/. If you find you are still having trouble with it after reading through that reference, please write us back with any specific difficulties you're running into and we'll do our best to help.
May. 20, 2013 | Tags: cool sites, weather radar, wral.com

Answer: At the time we are writing this response (mid-May) a number of "Brood II" emergences have been reported in North Carolina, mainly concentrated along a corridor from around Winston-Salem northeast toward Danville VA. We'll try to informally pass along reports from around our viewing area of there are any through our Facebook Page and maybe on the air a time or two, but for more in the way of regular updates and reference material, you might like to try websites like www.cicadamania.com (see links to recent blog posts on the right) and magicicada.org/magicicada_ii.php (there is a frequently updated map with recent reports plotted on a amap that you can zoom and pan). Good luck!
May. 19, 2013 | Tags: cool sites

Answer: At the time you wrote there had been a rather persistent or frequently re-occurring pattern in place that featured a trough of low pressure in the mid-levels of the atmosphere that was positioned with its central axis over the eastern United States. The result was a broad flow of air into that part of the country from the northwest, leading to cooler than normal temperatures and to relatively stable air near the surface that tends to work against the likelihood of severe storms.

More generally, a trough is an elongated area having air pressure that is lower than the pressure at the same altitude to either side of the trough. With most mid-level troughs over the United States, the axis of the trough runs more or less north to south, with winds on the west side of the trough flowing from northwest to southeast, and winds to the east of the trough axis flowing from southwest to northeast. If seen on a pressure chart with isobars, these troughs often feature lines of equal pressure that curve toward the south in a "U" or "V" shape. In many cases, the east side of the trough is favored for more cloudiness and areas of precipitation, while the west side is favored for dry weather and less cloud cover.
May. 18, 2013 | Tags: general meteorology

Answer: We assume you mean the latest in the calendar year that we first reached 90 degrees? If so, using data fromthe Raleigh-Durham airport, our latest date hitting 90 for the first time was on June 27th in 1983, with a high of 90 on that day. You might wonder if we ended up with an unusually low number of 90-degree days that year, but the answer is no, as 1983 ended up with 51 days that reached or exceeded that threshold. The average number of such days in the history of observations from RDU is 43, while the lowest number of 90-degree or higher days was a tie at 15 for both 1969 and 1972, while 2010 had the most such days with 91.
May. 17, 2013 | Tags: heat, records/extremes

Answer: There isn't a weather station we can check for an exact rainfall amount in your immediate neighborhood. However, there is a National Weather Service product that combines nearby gauge readings with radar-estimated rainfall amounts to make a contour map of rainfall amounts. We checked that map for your location and it gives an estimate of roughly 6-7 inches for May 2012. The contours indicate that rain in your area was little higher than right around Goldsboro itself, and three stations in the Goldsboro vicinity showed rain for that month of 5.05", 4.23" and 4.53". There is also a volunteer precipitation reporting site several miles east of Goldsboro that reported 6.85". That's about as much as we can check from here, and seems to indicate that you had a very rainy month, but more than likely not quite to the level in your charts. Of course, in situations involving heavy or convective precipitation, there can be large differences in rainfall over short distances, so we can't completely rule out that 11-inch value.
May. 16, 2013 | Tags: past weather, rain

Answer: The difference in time moonrise on any given day between Emerald Isle and Raleigh is roughly around 6 minutes, with the moon seen to rise first along the coast and then inland a bit later. The time differences you noticed were due to observing the moon on different days. Because the moon orbits the earth in the same direction that earth is rotating, each day we have to turn a little farther east to "catch up" with it, so that each day the moon rises significantly later than the day before. Because of this, moonrise can occur at any time of day or night. You can go to our "Almanac" page to see what time moon rise and set occurs in the Raleigh area for the current day, and there is a link below that to the U.S. Naval Observatory where you can obtain sun and moon rise and set times for any location on any date, in case you'd like to plan ahead for your next trip to the coast!
May. 15, 2013 | Tags: astronomy, cool sites, wral.com

Answer: Based on the date of your question, you were referring to about the third week or so of April. While we couldn't discern the particular day and check specific cloud observations for the time you saw the colored band in the sky, your description, together with the time of day you mentioned, would seem to rule out actual rainbow (due to lack of rain), sun dogs (as they occur when the sun is low in the sky early or late in the day) and the circumzenithal arc, which also requires the sun to be rather low in the sky. We're left with thinking you probably saw a circumhorizon arc, which requires the sun be quite high in the sky (in fact it only gets that high in our part of the world from around late March to mid-September) and fits the description of having relatively little curvature and often having very bright, pure colors. You can read more about these, and see a chart indicating the times of year they can form at different latitudes, along with a nice gallery of photos, at www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/chafreq.htm. Perhaps the photos there will confirm for you whether this is the phenomenon that you encountered.
May. 14, 2013 | Tags: atmospheric optics, cool sites

Answer: For Raleigh and most of central North Carolina, prevailing wind directions are from the southwest (from a compass direction of 230 or 240 degrees) ten months out of the year. The months of September and October are the exceptions, with a prevailing wind for those months from the northeast (030 to 040 degrees). Keep in mind that these are long-term averages, and there can quite a bit of short-term variability of wind direction in any given year.
May. 13, 2013 | Tags: normals, winds