We are unable to uipdate our ABC3340 weather forecast pages tonight due to technical difficulties…
No problem with the blog…but the weather forecast on the 3340 pages will be out of date until the problem is corrected…
Here is the Saturday morning forecast discussion…
I just got back from a quick trip to Washington, D.C. last night. It was a beautiful day on Friday, with clear, blue skies and temperatures in the 60s. Those were thanks to the same back door cold front that is in our neighborhood now. I always enjoy catching a quick train ride, even if was just from Union Station to BWI to fly out. Union Station truly is a national treasure. The weather was a bonus.
EXTREME DROUGHT: The big news around these parts is the continuing lack of rainfall. Despite some nice showers and storms Thursday night over northwestern sections, we continue under an extreme drought across much of North and North Central Alabama with severe drought conditions covering basically the northern half of the state. Our rainfall deficit is climbing quickly toward one foot again.
OUR FORECAST: We will be in a very high amplitude pattern the next few days, which just means that the jet stream will look like a roller coaster with a big trough in the East, big trough in the West and a ridge in the middle. As a weakening shortwave trough bypasses us to the north today, we will see decreasing shower chances. As the ridge builds in, shower chances will be limited on Sunday, and likely disappear for much of the coming week.
STORM CHASERS UNITE: And unite they will with a Saturday moderate risk on the Plains. Chasers will be converging on every supercell thunderstorm that develops today from around Oklahoma City up through Central Kansas and into Central Nebraska. A powerful upper level trough over the western United States is responsible for the activity yesterday, today and even tomorrow. The situation should begin to improve by Monday. It is the time of year for tornadoes on the Plains. Highs will be in the 80s today and tomorrow, but fall back into the 70s on Monday as a wedge of cooler air comes in from the east. Our next rain chance does not come in until the weekend, and it even looks puny.
TROPICS: Could we have a May tropical storm in the next few days? The GFS has been bullish on the idea, although the devil is in the details. It has been promoting the idea of a warm core, or tropical low near the Bahamas and a cold core low off the coast of the Carolinas. For now, the cold core solution is the leader in the clubhouse. Either way, a strong northeasterly onshore flow will buffet the Mid Atlantic coast down the Florida coast into early next week. May tropical storms are unusual, but not unheard of. Since we started naming storms in 1950 with the phonetic alphabet, I found the following May tropical storms: Able 1951; Arlene 1959; Alma 1970; Subtropical Storm Alpha 1972 and Arlene in 1981. That’s five in 58 years. Not good that we are already talking about the tropics in early May.
