Friday Morning Update

Welcome to Friday! 

The main upper level feature of interest continues to be a low pressure area located northeast of the state.  This low is slowly moving northeast away from the southern plains but will be able to produce a few more scattered showers or storms today before the chance dwindles this weekend.  This feature did produce a few widely scattered thunderstorms yesterday across eastern OK including one in the Tulsa metro.  This morning the radar indicates a number of scattered showers and thunderstorms across northern and central OK mainly located near the I-35 area slowly drifting southeast.  I did think a few of these may drift into our immediate area of concern through the morning hours before dissipating by midday.  A couple of additional showers or thunderstorms may develop later this afternoon across eastern OK or western Arkansas and I'll continue to keep a slight mention of activity in the forecast for the day.  Afternoon highs are still expected to reach the 89 to 92 degree range across most of the area with a sun-cloud mix.

The weekend will be dominated by the exiting trough and the expanding ridge located to our west.  The center of the western U.S. ridge will remain well west of the region but the eastern portion will be expanding its influence across part of the state and southern plains through the weekend.  The result will be an increase in both morning lows and daytime highs by a few degrees with a slow increase in low level moisture values.  The temperature heat index values will also slowly climb over the next few days.  Bottom line:  A return to the real July is underway!

Next week we anticipate morning lows in the 70s with afternoon highs in the mid-90s along with south winds around 10 to 20 mph.  Both the GFS and EURO data suggest a chance for some thunderstorms Wednesday or Thursday but the chance will remain on the low side.  Previous runs of these data suggested a weak boundary would move across the northern OK state line by Thursday, but this seems very unlikely at this point.  Our current forecast has a 30% chance for showers or storms both Wednesday and Thursday but I may lower the Thursday time period to a 20 pop.

The longer range portion of the GFS data interestingly enough develops another extreme western ridge-eastern trough pattern by 20^th of July or so.   

Yesterday the official high in Tulsa was 91 recorded at 2:22pm.  The normal daily average high is 92 and the low is 72.  Our daily record high is 108 recorded on this date in 1911 and the record low is 53 recorded in 1915.

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Thanks for reading the Friday Morning Weather Discussion and Blog.

Have a super great weekend.

Alan Crone

KOTV