An Active Pattern Soon

The weather yesterday was absolutely gorgeous for early January with sunshine and highs in the upper 60s and lower 70s.  We hit 71 downtown with upper 60s common across the entire northeastern OK area.  Temperatures today will be nice again with highs in the upper 60s near 70 along with a southwest surface wind in the 10 to 15 mph range.  The fire danger will again be elevated so use caution.  

A weak front will slide southward Friday evening between 7pm and 9pm bringing northwest winds and highs back down into the mid to upper 50s Saturday and into the upper 40s Sunday.  A few more clouds will be likely Saturday and we should experience mainly cloudy conditions Sunday.   

Enough moisture will be present across the Arklatex for a few showers.  The NAM data is suggesting some light precip will be possible Sunday evening into early Monday across central Kansas, NW OK ,and possibly across extreme NE OK.  We have added a slight chance for the Sunday evening and Monday morning time periods for this possibility.  Light snow would be possible across NW OK and central Kansas with a few sprinkles across NE OK.

 The second system continues to be the one of interest and will impact the southern plains Monday through Wednesday with increasing rain and storm chances across Texas and some light shower activity possible across Eastern OK Tuesday.  Most of the colder air will not arrive until the moisture moves eastward, but this pattern bears close scrutiny.  The h5 closed low will attempt to move northward across the Red River into Eastern OK Tuesday evening into Wednesday and could provide just enough cold air to squeeze out some snow flakes before the really cold and dry air arrives Wednesday morning into Thursday.  The depth and positioning of the southern stream low continues to change in the model output with GFS now being a little slower and the EURO faster.  The models also appear to handle the energy developing around the Aleutians quite differently by the end of next week.  Little confidence remains in anything past day 6 at this point.  But.... 

The pattern continues to support the potential southward movement of arctic air by sometime next week, but most indications from the AO indicate only a glancing blow for the week.  The long range models have continued to hint at a major pattern change for the following week that could result in a cross polar type flow.  This could open the gate for the Siberian express to plunge down into the Yukon and into the northern high plains, Midwest, and northeastern US.  Some of this could slide into our area, but operationally it's impossible to have any confidence with any one solution for the following week or so regarding the colder air potential.  Our main focus is the short term operational forecasting for sensible weather during the next 5 to 7 days with an emphasis on days 1 through 3.  Most folks just want to know what happens today, tomorrow, and for the weekend.  We try to keep that in mind when discussing the forecast, but it's extremely interesting to weather nerds like ourselves to see the possible pattern change that could bring winter weather back to parts of the country.

Earthquakes:

A minor quake ( 2.8 mag) was detected at 10:02 PM last night about 16 NE of Shawnee.

Follow me on twitter ( @alancrone) and on that thing the kids call Face book :)