Wild April, Cool Start to May.

As mentioned in this morning's blog, this has been a very windy month across the Sooner state; one of the windiest if not the windiest ever. April has also been a tale of two separate weather regimes. The first two weeks were much, much warmer than normal and along with the heat came more dryness. The last two weeks reversed that trend and along with the cooler conditions came rain; in some cases too much of it. When it is all said and done, this April will go down as not only being very windy, but also as wetter and warmer than normal.

The month of May will be getting off to a very cool and wet start as well. The front that brought the clearing skies and northerly winds this afternoon will stall out across the extreme SE counties of the state. Aloft, a series of disturbances will move from the SW to the NE along the surface boundary bringing clouds and periods of rain and perhaps some embedded thunder. Look for rain to start spreading back over much of the area during the day Sunday and most of us should be getting wet by afternoon.

The rain will also fall through some relatively dry air that has moved in behind the frontal boundary. As the rain falls, it will evaporate which takes heat from the air. This is a process known as evaporative cooling and will likely result in some very cool conditions for us on Sunday and again on Monday. Our warmest time of the day will be before the rain starts falling and with the rain expected to become widespread during the afternoon hours, then we will likely see falling temperatures for the afternoon as well. Bottom line is that 50s is the best we can expect and we may fall back into the upper 40s by late Sunday afternoon.

Monday will also be much cooler and wetter than normal. But after that, sunny skies are expected to return on Tuesday and as winds return to a more southerly direction we expect to see a gradual warming trend for the rest of the week. Even so, this first week of May will be getting off to a cooler than normal start.

As always, stay tuned and check back for updates.

Dick Faurot