Storms Followed By Active Pattern To End The Month

Thanksgiving is fast approaching and it’s not the time of year we often have to deal with severe weather. However, before we reach our turkey-eating time, some storms are imminent. If you are reading this on Tuesday in Green Country, the following storm information is pertinent to you. Beyond the next 12 hours, an active jet stream pattern will lend itself to big changes down the road that I’ll address below as well.

A potent storm system has drawn in a respectable amount of moisture for this time of year ahead of a cold front and dryline situated just west of Green Country on this Tuesday afternoon. Instability (the heat and moisture combination in the atmosphere) is lacking as it often does this time of year, but the honking dynamics (wind shear and strength of winds aloft) of this system may overcome that shortfall to create a few strong to severe thunderstorms during the evening hours. We’ve already seen one round of showers this morning into the midday hours. The second round is likely to fire just after dark in the area and race eastward toward the Arkansas border by around midnight. It’s a narrow window for locally damaging winds with a very minor tornado threat as well.  Since this is occurring after peak heating in the afternoon, the storms will have a meager supply of energy. It’s only through the powerful forcing in the atmosphere that these storms could maintain some strength for a few hours as they push along the leading edge of cooler air arriving tonight.  The storm threat area is shown below, encompassing most of the area.

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This system will clear the area just in time for our big travel day on Wednesday.  The upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest will face some messy weather, but our immediate area will dry out and cool down just a notch. Significantly colder air still remains locked up to our north in Canada. That cold air may come unhinged from that region and spill our direction in about a week, but the interim time frame looks great, if not absolutely ideal for traveling, turkey-eating, throwing around the football and shopping. We’ll have a few fast-moving storm systems traverse our region. However, the very progressive, east-to-west flow in the jet stream will not enable much time for moisture return. Thus, our forecast is dry with only minor temperature fluctuations between now and the weekend. The warmest day actually appears to be Thanksgiving with temperatures soaring well into the 60s. One or two spots might even hit 70°. As it often does, it’ll come with a gusty south wind so I would urge against outdoor fires given the increasingly dormant vegetation in our area. The jet stream pattern is shown below, showing a generally quiet and zonal flow pattern for the U.S. on Thanksgiving.

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Bigger changes arrive by Sunday as a more powerful storm system digs into our area. It will pull in more moisture ahead of the system and draw down colder air behind it. This will set the stage for several shots of colder air to come next week and each transition to the colder air could come with more rain chances. This will be much-needed moisture in light of our growing drought situation. These storm systems might finally strip our trees of most of their leaves, leaving us with a more winter-like look as we head into the month of December.  The outlooks below show the cooler than normal and more active pattern that takes hold at the turn of the month. After such a warm fall, we’re starting to catch up with the seasonally norms. Wintry weather may not be too far off.

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In the meantime, watch out for those storms and enjoy some great weather for the holiday! We’ll keep you posted over the holiday weekend on the bigger storm systems to come. Be sure to follow me on Twitter: @GroganontheGO and follow me on Facebook Page.