Lance Bosart's Epic Struggle To Understand And Predict High-Impact Mesoscale Events By Relating Them To More Predictable Large-Scale Dynamics

A common thread weaving through Lance Bosart’s publications, talks, exhortations, and conversations is his obvious passion for understanding and improving predictions of weather events that matter to people.  In recent years, the email list serve that he established features Lance’s outline every Friday of important events of the past week that demand explanations.  A bad forecast of a high-impact event is a particular challenge that he asks us to explain.  This talk starts with an early example of this passion (Bosart and Sanders 1981) to explain the devastating flood in Johnstown PA in 1977, clearly a mesoscale event, but Lance, with his former advisor, did their best to show that it was related to a large mesoscale system in South Dakota 4 days previously.  More recent and more successful examples are the now well-known papers on predecessor rainfall events that often do as much damage as the tropical cyclone ahead of which they form.