Back To Work

We have just wrapped up a night of scattered thunderstorms across southeastern and east central OK.  The Tulsa metro was on the northwest side of this activity and very little rainfall occurred in the city.  Locations southeast of Tulsa did receive some much needed rainfall overnight in the form of strong to near severe storms.  A few severe storm warnings were required in spots and thankfully no tornado warnings were needed in our immediate area.

The clouds should thin from the northwest to the southeast later this morning giving way to mostly sunny conditions by afternoon, if not sooner, with highs in the lower 70s.  Breezy northwest winds around 10 to 20 mph will be common and humidity will be somewhat low this afternoon.  The fire danger will be elevated, down from the high category, but not by much.  Burn bans are still in place. 

The next system will be approaching Thursday into Friday with a few showers and storms possible.  This will not be a high impact system and the chance will remain around 20 to near 30% for the area.  The model output does have some differences on where the best chance will actually occur with one set indicating the northeast part of the state and other models indicating along the Red River.  The confidence for this period of the forecast will be a little on the low side, but not much.

Cooler air will be likely from Friday into the weekend before the pattern begins to change into early next week. 

Temperatures will be dropping into the upper 30s for morning lows this weekend with highs in the 60s.  Raw buf files from the GFS spit out some upper 50 readings Saturday and Sunday.  I suppose this would be possible with a dense overcast, but I just can't have any faith in these data.

The ensemble members would suggest an active pattern next week with plenty of opportunity for showers and storms.  This will be a good thing for the drought stricken areas of the state, but we may also be dealing with more severe weather chances next week.  The "normal climate" of the southern plains would also suggest the "up tick" in the active weather.

Next:

Failure.

Have you ever heard the saying "failure is not an option"?  I know you have.

And guess what?  Failure is an option.  It's just an option that we don't want to choose.  But it is something we will experience.  Many of us will experience it time and time again, but how we handle failure says something about our success.

I was reminded of this yesterday while watching Rory Mcllroy in the closing minutes of the Masters Golf Tournament coverage on CBS.  The 21 year old had been leading the entire field for most of the event, but lost his edge on the back nine dropping from first place to shooting 8 over par and finishing with a final round of 80. He faced a reporter and a "live mic" immediately after the finishing hole.  I was wondering what he would manage to say and he handled it graciously.  I'll paraphrase for you:  this experience will be a growing experience and hopefully it will build some character.

It's actually a debatable point on whether or not this qualifies as "failure".  After all, he did play better than most of the field and finished well ahead of many other notable players. But, the golfing world will say it was a failure.  A "meltdown" on the last day of one of the world's most prestigious golfing events.

 By the way, failure just doesn't happen to a 21 year old golfer on a world stage, but also to a morning weather forecaster who happens to be poorly composing this message at 2:40AM Monday morning. What's the take away?  Life goes on.  The world will still spin.  Rory surely still has good friends that will stick by him no matter what. And I'll fail many more times in my life compared to any amount of success. Maybe Rory and I will both grow from our experiences and build more character.