Webberweather53
Meteorologist
La Ninas are notorious for unusually early season severe weather outbreaks especially over the lower Mississippi and Tennessee Valleys (Super Tuesday February 2008 for ex) due in part to the aforementioned warm up over the SE US late in the winter that leads to a very strong baroclinic zone over the central part of the country as Cp & arctic airmasses continue to flood the Pacific NW, northern Rockies, & upper Midwest which leaves a lot of potential barortropic (conversion of basic state kinetic energy into available eddy kinetic energy) and baroclinc energy conversion (conversion of basic state available energy into eddy available energy) to be had for any incipient disturbance that becomes entrained into this sort of pattern. Essentially the difference between barotropic energy conversion and baroclinic energy conversion is that the former (barotropic energy conversion) relies on pre-existing energy (derived from the kinetic energy of the background flow, very common form of energy conversion in the tropics, wherein there exists little-no temperature gradients (& thus little potential energy) & it's also observed in the mid latitudes due to waves leaning against the bgd shear (negatively tilted (NW-SE orientated waves south of the jet, north of the jet core, barotropic energy conversion actually favors positively tilted waves). Baroclinic energy conversion, one many are often more inherently familiar with, is a more fancy way of saying that pre-existing temperature gradients (which also implies density gradients) leave a lot of potential energy to be had and the Rossby Waves we observe on a day-to-day basis convert this potential energy into a more useable form (I.e Eddy potential energy) which is realized as a strengthening low or high pressure system (in a general sense)
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