Get ready for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs from Columbia Pictures and Sony Picture Animation! It will be the most delicious event since macaroni met cheese. Inspired by the beloved children’s book by Judi Barrett, the film focuses on a town where food falls from the sky like rain.

A slow moving system centered over Texas appears to not be in a hurry to go anywhere fast. The lingering system is bring rain and flooding to much of the southern states and even into the central plains. The Norman, OK WFO has issued Flood Watches for most of central Oklahoma as periods of heavy rain are dumping up to an inch per hour in some areas.

While at the bookstore that bares my family name the other day I picked up an interesting book that has been published annually in September since 1792 – The Old Farmer’s Almanac (OFA).

NASA’s TRMM Satellite is providing meteorologist with a lot of unique opportunities to study tropical rainfall rates, and tropical cyclones. TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) has an on-board radar that can scan storms with incredible accuracy from space.

BUENOS AIRES – A violent storm described as a freak “tornado” killed at least 17 people in the southern part of South America and punched hundreds of houses off their foundations Tuesday, officials said.

Tropical Storm Fred strengthened into a hurricane over the east Atlantic Tuesday. The National Hurricane Center’s track forecast will quickly push Fred to the north allowing the hurricane to steer clear of any land.

At 5:00 PM AST, the National Hurricane Center named Tropical Depression Seven – soon to be Tropical Storm Fred. Fred however is going to remain at sea and very likely won’t even get anywhere close to the western Atlantic.

A strong tropical wave is showing increasing organization and convection and according to the National Hurricane Center this system is likely to become the seventh tropical depression of the 2009 Atlantic Basin Hurricane Season.

The National Hurricane Center has downgraded Erika to a tropical depression, and it is expected that the storm will be further reduced to a mere low within a day. NHC’s wording is pretty straight-forward in that they do not believe that Erika will be able to regain any organized activity and restrengthen. And, kudos to NHC forecasters for going against the hurricane model guidance and getting it right.

I’ve probably just about wore out the life of this video, but there are some chase days that you’ll probably remember forever. I have many, but May 29th 2004 stands out for me. Particularity because of the shear ‘quality’ of the first tornado of what became a significant tornado outbreak across central Kansas.

The National Hurricane Center has played Erika very cautiously and with good understanding. There are a lot of inconsistencies between various forecast model guidance. The latest official forecast track issued by NHC shows that narrow black line move in a west-northwest direction, but Erika has decided once again to play by her own rules.

The title is a bit misleading, this post couldn’t obviously provide a detailed analysis of the entire tropical climatology for September.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami just issued Tropical Discussion #2 on Tropical Storm Erika and its pretty much a repeat of the first discussion. But really interest me is the official NHC forecast verses the HWRF and the GFDL model forecast (which have been fairly accurate so far this season).

The following is real – I could make this up if I tried! It is an Area Forecast Discussion issued by National Weather Service Meteorologist – Gino Izzi, Sr. Forecaster, NWS Chicago/Romeoville. Introduction made, I leave you to read “Ode to Summer”, by Meteorologist Izzi:

The 5th named storm of the 2009 Atlantic Tropical Season is now Tropical Storm Erika. The NHC forecast graphic below show the forecast track of Erika and keep the storm forecast as a tropical storm.