Wednesday Morning Update

Regarding the short term, we have no major changes from yesterday's forecast. We are looking at daytime highs into the lower or mid 90's today with South southwest winds 10 to 15 miles per hour.  Temperature heat index values will be near 97 to 98. We'll start with clear skies but finish with a few clouds this afternoon.  

 Our mid-level Ridge of high pressure remains the dominant feature across the southern plains. But this ridge will slowly slide Southwest over the next 24 to 36 hours, allowing a week upper level disturbance to approach our area Friday or Saturday. This disturbance is currently located west of our area this morning and will be responsible for a few showers and thunderstorms across West Texas and Eastern New Mexico.   As the ridge slides southwest, the disturbance may move north east across part of Kansas before slowly sliding south east to near northern Oklahoma Friday and Saturday. The model data remains consistent in depicting this upper level disturbance but the NAM data keeps the system slightly west of our area while GFS/EURO brings it near NE OK.  Data is inconsistent regarding any precipitation with this system. Therefore we feel it's a prudent call to keep only a very slight mention of showers and storms for Friday and Saturday across extreme eastern OK and NW Arkansas. The probability of rain or storm activity in any given location remains near or less than 10 percent and we'll not place these very low probabilities on the 7 day planner at this point.  

EURO data support a possible weak boundary sliding across northern OK Sunday brining north winds Sunday evening into early Monday.  GFS is about a day late, and keeps the boundary mainly north of 412.  It's hard to imagine a big southward push from any surface front at this point, and we'll keep the boundary stationary across extreme northern OK Sunday night into Monday for few hours.   If this boundary does end up draped across the northern third of the state early next week, we'll see a few showers and storms at times across the northern third of the state.  The confidence is too low to include any mentions at this point. 

 Temperatures will remain at or above the seasonal average through the weekend including morning lows and 70's daytime highs mid 90s. Data supports a run up to near 100 Thursday and Friday but the green vegetation may keep us under the mark.  The mid-level Ridge of high-pressure may remain near our area early next week, but temperatures may also drop a few degrees by Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday of next week. 

 The official high temperature in Tulsa yesterday afternoon was 92 recorded at 3:52pm.

 The normal high temperature is now 91 and the normal low is 69. 

 Our daily records include a high of 104 from both 1963 and 1912.  Our record low is 53 from 1967.

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 Thank you for reading the Wednesday morning forecast discussion and blog.   

 Have a super great day.

 Alan Crone