Warm And Humid Day Before Rain Chances Return

We’re continuing to hold with a mostly warm and humid forecast for the next few days, but active weather is likely to develop by the end of the week, influencing outdoor activities from Friday through the weekend with rain and thunder chances.  Highs today will again move into the lower and mid-90s along with heat index values anywhere from 97 to 103 across the area.  Winds will remain from the south around 10 to 15 mph.  Any shower activity both today and tomorrow would be highly isolated and mostly across extreme eastern or southeastern OK during the peak heating of the afternoon. 

 A midlevel ridge of high pressure is centered slightly east of the metro this morning with a trough of low pressure positioned across the pacific northwest.  This will keep the basic same weather across the area today that we experienced yesterday.  Persistence remains.  But the pattern continues to show signs of changing some by Thursday and Friday with several items of interest impacting sensible weather Friday through the weekend. 

 A tropical disturbance is located across the Gulf of Mexico this morning.  While it’s very unlikely this exact disturbance will survive a trip northward into eastern OK, gulf moisture will be surging northward into the state by at least Thursday night or Friday setting the stage for shower and storm chances Friday into the weekend.  There will also be a surface front positioned across part of central Kansas that may or may not drop southward into far northern OK Saturday evening into Sunday morning.  If the front does appear and set up across far northern OK, we’re in the running for pockets of very heavy rainfall and possibly a few strong to severe storms.  Even if the front stalls northward, some parameters in this morning’s data would suggest a possibility of a few severe storms this weekend regardless of any boundary nearby. 

We started rather conservatively yesterday regarding the probability for activity this weekend, and I’m inclined to increase the chances some for the weekend, even though uncertainty remains with the evolution of the front.  The potential for additional moisture will keep the muggy factor quite high, but additional cloudy cover and the possible boundary also argues for lower daytime highs.  I’ll bring the chances up slightly compared to yesterday, but still don’t want to go too far up at tins point due to some discrepancies in the model data.  As things look now, some of our Friday night football games may be dealing with scattered storms. And outdoor activities this weekend would also be contending with occasional active weather.

Thanks for reading the Tuesday morning weather discussion and blog.

Have a super great day!

Alan Crone