A Brief Overview of the Weather for the Next Few Days

After the storm we had on Tuesday moved out of the area, we saw sunny skies and chilly weather on Wednesday as cold air filtered into the area behind the storm system. Today and Friday will have quite similar conditions, as a zonal flow across the county will not allow for any major dips in the jet stream to support strong storms.

A strong high pressure system has moved into the eastern half of the country, just to our south. This will provide our area with sunny skies and westerly winds for today, with temperatures in the mid 40s for most of the area. Tonight/Friday morning’s low temperature should be in the upper 20s in most of the region, with low 30s in more urban locales.

The 00z GFS forecast at 500mb, valid for Friday at 2pm. The pattern across the country is zonal, leading to no major storm systems for our area.

For Friday’s forecast, I’m going to show a couple of visuals. At 500mb, you can see the zonal flow across most of the country, which is helping to keep things quiet, for the most part. There is a ridge of warmth in the Central Plains which is heading eastward, which will warm us up a tad for Saturday and especially for Sunday and the days after that. Also, you can see a very weak area of vorticity in Michigan associated with a small shortwave trough that is heading eastward. This, combined with the fact that the warm air to the south and west will be overrunning the chillier airmass to the north and east will help to provide clouds and showers to the region for Saturday. The rain, if any, though, should be quite light and not cause too many problems.

The 00z GFS forecast at the surface valid for 2pm on Friday. The 1035mb high pressure to our north will keep things chilly for Friday. However, once that high pressure moves out, temperatures will warm quite a bit for Sunday and Monday.

Another thing you might notice is that despite the shortwave trough, the heights in the east are pretty high. Based on that alone, you would probably expect temperatures to be in the mid 50s. However, if you go to the surface, you can see that there is a 1035mb high pressure system building into Ontario and Quebec, which helps to keep cold, northerly winds at the surface, despite the warm air aloft. This should help to keep high temperatures in mid 40s for Friday. Skies will also be quite sunny for most of the day because of the fact that the relatively cold air at the surface and the relatively warm air aloft leads to a stable atmosphere, and thus no lift for clouds. Once the evening and night time hours roll around, clouds should increase a bit in advance of our potential showers for Saturday. High temperatures on Saturday should be around 50 – they would be warmer if it were not for the cloud cover.

Once that high pressure scoots eastward and out of the area and that ridge moves in from the Plains, our temperatures will sky rocket for Sunday. Temperatures should be able to reach the upper 50s on Sunday and perhaps even hit 60 for Monday. However, another weak disturbance to our north could set off some showers for Sunday night into Monday, but both days themselves should be primarily dry.