Fireball confirmed Friday night with more trails of fire in the sky this week! A new month will bring a new weather pattern!
Here is what it looked like Friday night in our sky at about 10:15 p.m. The nice festive weather was not the only talk of the town this weekend, that is for sure! The bluish-white streak of light with a green tail and red fragments was a fireball or bolide which raced east in about 8 seconds. Here is a file picture of what a bolide actually looks like. It lit the sky up and was much brighter than last month's super moon. It was a simply stunning sight. We had several e-mails in from Camden County Georgia last night of folks saying they have never seen a meteor that bright and it was so intense that a sonic boom was heard about 2 minutes after it passed near the horizon. It did look like it may have made it to the ground but there is no confirmation on this as of yet. It was seen as far west as Alabama and as far north as South Carolina!
This is a rare type of meteoroid or shooting star that happens when a much larger space rock that meets our atmosphere. Usually meteoroids are the size of grains of sand this one was likely larger and maybe the size of one or two of my weather clickers which I showed on Good Morning Jacksonville to give you some more perspective. The trailing reddish tail that seemed to be burning up was caused by this space rock igniting due to extreme friction when it met the earth's atmosphere traveling at close to 100,000 mph! The blue and green colors tell us its chemical composition was made of copper. The reddish color was a sign that it was also made of silicate.
This type of event is rare and only occurs about once every year. This week we will keep our eyes to the sky for more shooting stars. We have the Eta Aquarids meteor shower that peaks on Thursday night and Friday morning. Expect about 10 shooting stars per hour and they are known to also leave fiery trails since these meteors making up this shower are known to move at a whopping 150,000 mph. Make sure to look to the east southeast about an hour or two before dawn on Friday morning. This shower is caused by the earth going through the dust trail of Halley's comet which will not be visible to earth until mid-2061 and was last seen our sky in 1986. Enjoy the show.
Nature is also lighting up the skies this week with more storms which are breaking out across some of the tornado ravaged areas of the deep south. While severe weather is likely it will not be nearly as widespread as last week. Here at home this weather system will warm us up to well above average temperatures over the next couple days. By time it arrives late Tuesday night and Wednesday it looks like it will not have much wind shear or moisture to work with limiting instability. This means do not expect another squall line of storms, just isolated shower or thunderstorm activity.
If there is good news the long-range models for the rest of May keep our average high temperatures at least closer to normal after our warmest April in 9 years. More importantly rainfall should start picking up as well and end closer to normal. This pattern change is being caused by many factors including pressure changes across the globe. This includes a much weaker Bermuda high pressure in the southeast and a stronger high pressure near Greenland. This set up brought us beneficial rains to start the new year. This is welcome news but for this week no help for our plants but we will have a nice reinforcing shot of Spring weather by late week!
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