A Hot Weekend

The weak boundary stayed just a hair south of the Tulsa area yesterday afternoon and this created a minor victory in the heat wave with highs only near 103 to 108 across eastern OK.  It's a sad day when 104 " feels good". 

The highs this afternoon are expected in the 103 to 109 range with a chance of a few isolated showers and storms. 

A few storms are continuing at this hour across southern Kansas and extreme eastern OK due to the presence of the boundary combined with the low level jet and position of the mid level ridge center which is south of our area. 

 The boundary currently located along the Kansas state line is expected to remain into the southern Kansas area before slowly oozing southward across the state line this weekend.  The morning lows this weekend will be in the lower to mid 80s with afternoon highs around 104 to 110 in some locations.  

The ridge is continuing to slowly weaken and is also flattening.  It will begin to migrate westward soon.  This will allow a northwest flow aloft to brush southeastern Kansas and extreme NE Ok this weekend.  A few storms complexes are likely to form in western Kansas and will track east and southeast with time.  There will be a slight chance that a complex may clip far NE OK during the next 3 days, but the odds remain low. 

As stated here several times over the past week, the pattern according to the computer models will change soon.  Also stated here last week ( and the week prior) was information that the " pattern should change soon" and it didn't.

The difference in the data over the past three days is the consistency in the output from both the GFS and the EURO and their respective ensembles.  This is leading to a higher than usual confidence factor for days 6 and 7 in the forecast.  I don't want to lend too much confidence, but the solutions continue to give us some hope for a break in the heat wave.  My confidence level for a front arriving by the middle of next week is currently a 4 out of 10, with 10 being the highest confidence level.