Good Morning...did you know...as we wonder when we'll hit the 90 degree mark for the first time of the year...how many times LAST year we hit 90 degrees through June 30th? The answer coming up at the end of the blog...
We we had a few showers move through earlier this AM...rainfall amounts are rather skimpy...and many on the MO side had fewer drops, if any. So if you wake up in the mid AM hours...you probably didn't even know about the rain. There were a few rumbles of thunder and some slightly heavier t/showers well west of the metro...but that was about it...so where do we go from here for the rest of the day? An analysis of the surface data shows a light chaotic flow across the midwest...tough to make out exactly where the front is this AM...probably still lurking to our NW...latest RUC data is not too encouraging for more t/storms around these parts this afternoon...CAPES are meager at best and while we're uncapped...I'm not seeing much for a focusing mechanism for additional t/storm development...however with maybe a strange outflow lurking or perhaps the actual front around later this afternoon I'll keep that chance alive...probably down to 30% for later today...it's tough to find much if any convergence through any layer of the atmosphere...so the activity may be very spotty, if any at all...
From tomorrow on...just very muddled with the rain chances...I'll keep the chance of storms around on TUE...but in reality any weak little disturbance caught in the flow can give us some moisture...early this week a "dirty" ridge is going to control the weather around here...now it's not what you think...this is when a ridge in the atmosphere has weak little ripples in it or moving through it...so we refer to it as "dirty." It's not like a typical summer time ridge which cleanly pokes up through the central plains to the northern plains (paint a mental image)...this one is messier...it want to be there...and certainly is farther west into the Rockies and the SW...but for us...we're still not there yet. Eventually the ridge will firm up a bit more on it's eastern side...and stretch somewhat into the plains states towards the end of the week...
The ridge though is anything but "dirty" out west...where there were quite a few record highs yesterday (broken or tied) including Phoenix at 115 (t) Yuma @ 116 (t), Imperial, CA @ 116 and Los Angeles @ 92 (LAX)...California by far had the most in terms of the numbers of record highs...and that ridge will persist there for the next few days...latest EURO data is not too optimistic about pushing any extreme heat our way...as a matter of fact...taken as gospel we stay in quasi NW flow through early July...however as we gradually dry out...we'll start pressing those highs closer and closer to 90 over the next 5-10 days (if not slightly above)...
While we've talked extensively about the flooding...there are several parts of the country that are insanely dry...one area in particular is a small area of the OK Panhandle/Extreme SW KS/SE CO...here is the latest from the folks who
monitor the drought...it's rated as "exceptionally" dry there which is technically as bad as it gets concerning the "dryness". Data that I looked at this AM show good parts of the OK Panhandle 4-10" below average for the last 6 months...for an area that doesn't get that much to begin with...that's not good.
So that's about it...may have an update later this PM if weather warrants..Chris is still churning away at the numbers for his research project...if he finishes today we'll try to get something posted on his data this evening...but he's got excel sheets open all over and I have no clue how that stuff works...
The answer by the way to the question I posed at the beginning is exact 1 day with temps 90 or above through 6/30/2007 (June 15th)...we didn't start to sizzle till after 7/4 but man was it hot after that!
Joe
