More on the Thanksgiving Day Outlook.

The coming work week looks pretty quiet as far as the weather is concerned, but the week of Thanksgiving could be a very different story. More about that in a moment, but first let's deal with some short term issues. With partly sunny or mostly cloudy skies for much of the day today and mostly cloudy skies for Monday and much of Tuesday, the question of rain needs to be addressed. Currently, there remains a rather weak precipitation signal in most of the model guidance for the latter part of the day Monday and into early Tuesday. The amount of available moisture is limited, and the lift provided by the upper level system moving overhead is not particularly strong. Thus, will keep a slight 20% chance in the forecast for Monday ending by early Tuesday. The more eastern counties may end up with a better chance, but what rain does fall should be on the light side.

The clouds and possibility of rain have implications for temperatures as well. Daytime highs should be in the 50s today and Monday with overnight lows in the upper 30s to near 40. Another cold front will be arriving during the morning hours of Wednesday but this system is expected to be dry due to a lack of sufficient moisture for anything more than some cloud cover. That will be followed by a chilly day Thursday and then a warming trend going into the coming weekend.

Then, there is the week of Thanksgiving. As mentioned yesterday, we get numerical guidance out to 16 days, but it is not anything more than that….just guidance. Not something you would want to bet the farm on. With that caveat in mind, I mentioned yesterday that the preliminary guidance suggests that our Thanksgiving Day looks promising as a significant storm system is expected to be moving across the state in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. So far, that remains the case as the guidance has remained fairly consistent. What could turn out to be a very wet system is still taking shape for early next week and IF the timing does not change significantly, then it should be on past us by Thanksgiving. Again, that is a very big IF and something we will be keeping a close eye on.

In the meantime, stay tuned and check back for updates.

Dick Faurot