Dick Faurot's Weather Blog: Chance Of Rain Wed, More Likely By Weekend.

The dreary, drizzly start to our day did not produce much in the way of rainfall as you can see on the daily rainfall map, courtesy of the OK Mesonet.  As expected, most of what was measurable occurred in the far eastern counties and that activity has moved on out of the state at this time.  However, another cool front will be arriving during the morning hours of Wednesday and will bring another chance of showers and light rain.  This will be a rapidly moving system so amounts will again be on the light side and primarily confined to the morning hours followed by clearing skies during the afternoon.

You can see the effect of the lingering cloud cover over the more eastern counties in the max/min temperature map for today.  A similar impact is anticipated for Wednesday as the skies will be slowly clearing from W – E by afternoon or evening which should result in the warmest temperatures for the more western counties where they will have at least some sunshine.  That will be despite a brisk NW wind for much of the day which will bring in drier air, thus the clearing skies, but not much cooler air initially.  The cooler air will be arriving by the evening and overnight hours followed by a much cooler start to our day on Thursday morning as you can see on the forecast page.

By the way, as you look at the forecast page, keep in mind the normal high/low for today in Tulsa is 70/47 and of course gradually falling in the days ahead to 68/45 to start the month of November.  I mention that because our normal first freeze date usually occurs during that first week of November but we currently do not see any really cold air headed our way.  More about that in a moment.

What we do see headed this way is another potentially very wet system which will be moving in from the west on Friday, lingering for much of the day Saturday, and finally ejecting on eastward Sunday.  There are still some questions regarding the timing and intensity of this particular system; but, they all agree that we will start getting wet on Friday.  The only real question is whether it will be late morning or not till later in the day.  In either event, it certainly looks like rain will be a good bet for the Friday night football games.

Saturday morning should also start off with rain likely but there are significant differences regarding how quickly the rains move out during the day and any redevelopment that evening/night and into the morning hours of Sunday.  Right now, it looks like a good chance of at least some lingering showers into the Halloween time frame, but that is certainly subject to change.  As you can see on the 7 day QPF map, it still looks like we will be on the northern fringe of the heavier precipitation from this particular system.

After that, early next week will see a significant warm-up with a return to southerly winds and lots of sunshine.  In fact, looking further down the road, we continue to see a signal suggesting temperatures will average above normal and precipitation above normal as well as you can see on the 8-14 day outlooks.

So, stay tuned and check back for updates.

Dick Faurot