Dick Faurot's Weather Blog: More Rain On The Way

This has been quite a day with the widespread rains off and on pretty much all day long and a gusty NE wind keeping temperatures on the cool side. In fact, the high temperature for this date will go down in the record book as 69, but that was shortly after midnight and temperatures through most of the daytime hours have been around the 60 degree mark.

Although some light rain and showers are still falling as I write, notice the first map has the totals over the last 24 hours across the state, courtesy of the OK Mesonet. Some locations have received some very significant totals and there have also been some local drainage problems where the heavier rains have occurred. At least some of our western neighbors have also gotten into the act with some good totals across the western counties as well.

And, it is not over yet. Notice on our forecast page that there will be at least a chance of showers and possibly some storms just about every day, right on into the coming weekend; this unsettled pattern is also not being handled very well by the numerical models with lots of run to run and inter-model inconsistencies which leads to a rather low confidence forecast in the days ahead.

Tuesday will also be cloudy, cool, and with some lingering showers off and on for much of the day. As a result, daytime highs will only be in the lower 60s after starting the day near 50. Based on the latest, greatest data runs, the best day of this forecast cycle looks to be Wednesday. At least, that day will have the least chance of rain and the best chance of seeing at least some sunshine.

After that, a strong upper level disturbance will be drifting our way for the latter part of the week and the position, strength, and timing of this system is the big forecast challenge over that time period.

To illustrate the run to run variance, notice the two maps of the 500 mb level which is about 18,000 feet high valid for 1 PM this coming Friday as depicted by the GFS. The first solution, which was initialized at 7 AM this morning, has the storm center in New Mexico. The second one, which was initialized at 1 PM this afternoon, has the upper level storm center in NE KS. That is a significant difference and has huge implications on our sensible weather.

Typically, in situations like this, the off-hour run is discounted - which would be the run initialized this afternoon. Even though it is the most recent data run, it does not have the benefit of weather balloon data for initialization and will often be the one that is an outlier.

At least, we are crafting the forecast more towards the early morning guidance, which strongly suggests more unsettled weather later this week and into the weekend.

In fact, the 7 day QPF map also suggests the potential for some significant additional rainfall, most of which would likely fall late this week.

So, in the meantime stay tuned and check back for updates.

Dick Faurot