Dick Faurot's Weather Blog: Cool, Wet Wednesday

The system that moved through early this morning dropped some good rains for the far northern counties, as you can see on the rainfall map courtesy of the OK Mesonet. As you can see, some locations received as much as an inch or more of rainfall.

More rain is on the way for the overnight hours tonight and into the day Wednesday as a vigorous cool front will be moving through the state with widespread showers and some storms along and ahead of the actual frontal boundary, but even more rain likely on the back side of it.

Notice the 2-day QPF map, for example, which suggests the potential for another inch or so of rain for many locations - with some locally higher amounts certainly possible. That will occur primarily during the night tonight, through the morning hours, and then tapering off from west to east during the afternoon.

Brisk northerly winds will also usher in some much cooler temperatures for Wednesday; in fact, afternoon temperatures will at times be almost 30 degrees below the 91 that was recorded for today. That’s right, look for temperatures for much of the day to be in the 60s with a bit of a rebound by late afternoon after the showers have ended, and we may have some sunshine by then. The record cold maximum temperature for Wednesday is 74 and we expect to be below that pretty much all day, but temperatures shortly after midnight and before the cold front arrives will be warmer, so we will not technically set a record.

Any way you look at it though, it will certainly be much cooler, and that will set the stage for a very cool start to the day on Thursday. Our skies should be clearing Wednesday night, the winds will be calming down and temperatures will be dropping into the 50s to start the day. That will be close to record levels as well, but the residual moisture from the Wednesday rains will also lead to the potential for a foggy start.

After that, as you can see on our forecast page, temperatures will rebound going into the weekend and we may even see some 90s on Saturday. But, another cool front arriving on Sunday will knock temperatures back somewhat along with providing another chance of showers or storms - nothing to the extent of what we will experience over the next 24 hours though.

Looking further down the road, the 8-14-day outlooks suggest a return to above normal temperatures along with below normal chances of precipitation as we end the month of August. By the way, so far the month is running just a bit cooler than normal but also much drier than normal.

So, stay tuned and check back for updates.

Dick Faurot