Air Masses: Occluded Fronts

Who wants to look at a mess?  Not your room, like a really big mess in the sky?  Yes!  Occluded fronts are what I would call a big mess!

If you like soap operas...you're gonna like occluded fronts!  Okay!  We have a large, cold, mass of air that moves in and tries to take over.  There is a mass of air that isn't as cold as the big, bad, mass of coldest air ever...it gets pushed out of the way by the big, coldest mass!  To top it off, warm air gets trapped in the middle and it tries to make things right between the coldest air and the cool air, but it can't, so it barely escapes out the top of the masses and then begins to cry! 

Isn't that the saddest story!  Such a mess!

I know!  And I thought my life was a soap opera...

Oh! The drama!

The weather map explains it simply.  The coldest front will follow the warm air mass, the warm air can't quite escape the other less cool air mass and they kind of spin around in a cat and mouse type of game.  We know who wins.  The coldest air of course, because it is very cold, very dense and all those molecules close together can bulldoze a warm front right out of existence!

What if you can't stand an occluded front? Is there anywhere you could live where they can't be found?  Why yes, as a matter of fact!  The occluded front is not very common in the southeastern part of the United States.  For some reason occluded fronts get started in the low pressure regions of the south, but they don't completely form until they have traveled up north.  So I guess, if you hate drama, you shouldn't live in the south. But! If you like starting drama?  The south is for you!