A Windy Weekend

The main weather issue involves what will occur Monday or Tuesday.  The models continue to offer widely varying solutions regarding the period.  A medium length trough will swing across the northern and central plains Monday while the bowling ball of vorticity currently off the west coast will be moving eastward in the southern stream.  This phasing of the two systems is very problematic in the data due to the problems I outlined yesterday in the morning blog.  The models will continue to struggle with the timing and location of the H5 system off the west coast until it moves closer to land and has a chance of being sampled correctly in the upper air network.   

The EURO solution continues to be somewhat faster than the GFS, but even the EURO is now slowing down a hair while keeping most of the significant low level moisture to out southeast.  A veering surface wind this weekend appears likely to shove any moisture eastward or it will stay mainly southeast.  

The GFS is continuing to lag a full day or so behind the EURO and continues to dig the southern system more southward before lifting across Texas Tuesday.  This would also keep most of the pops to out southeast. 

The real outlier of the whole deal may actually be the central-northern plains trough.  This trough will slide across the nation Sunday and Monday and will brush Northern OK Sunday evening into Monday.  If for some reason the low level moisture can return before Monday (and this is questionable) we'll have a decent shot of showers or storms Monday across eastern OK.  So…what to do? 

I have decided to make no changes to the ongoing pop structure.  I think we're in the best shape that we could possibly obtain given the uncertainty of the model solutions.  Needless to say, the confidence maybe on the low side, but that's our story and we're stick'n to it.

Earthquakes:

The USGS has posted some information regarding the recent swarm of Oklahoma earthquakes and how they intend to partner with our friends from the Oklahoma Geological survey to deploy more monitoring devices. 
I have placed the link below, but it's not " hot".   This means you'll need to copy and paste the link into your browser to read the article, or you can search for USGS.

http://www.usgs.gov/blogs/features/usgs_top_story/oklahoma-struck-by-series-of-quakes/