Good afternoon bloggers,
It is going to rain today! Good news for some of your lawns. A disturbance that formed last night is slowly spinning by today. Rainfall amount will vary from 1/10th of an inch to possibly an inch of rain in a few spots. This is a rapidly growing area of rain and it should last a few hours , but then move off to the south and east and end. So, it is going to end up being a cooler and wet August day.
There seems to be a lot of frustration out there with the forecast changing with each model run. There has been a good reason for these changes. The models have been all over the place, and predicting the movement of an upper low that was in Canada, turning south, and how it would affect us is one of the toughest forecasts. Here is the latest, and finally I am extremely confident in this change to the forecast. Look below at the forecast for 1 PM Friday:
This is the 500 mb level, or around 18,000 feet up in the atmosphere. The reason most forecasts had rain in there every day is because of an upper level circulation that was forecast to develop over northeast Kansas today. It is NOT happening as you can see in the 30 hour forecast above. Today's disturbance will move south of the area tonight. We will be in north flow aloft with no hint of that spin-off (as I called it last night on the 1 AM newscast). This will allow high pressure at the surface to build in, lowering our dewpoints, and not only ending the threat of rain by Friday or Saturday, but bringing us the exact opposite......spectacular summer weather. The upper low is now forecast to be way back over Wyoming and still dropping southwest.
We will be tracking these developments on the air tonight at 5, 6, and midnight (after the Olympics) on NBC Action News. At least it looks like we will get some rain today. It has been a dry month of August, so let's soak it in. Have a good afternoon. We will try to answer your questions and provide therapy for the emotional weather ride we are all going through.
Grif is the captain of this Ultimate Frisbee team. They are playing in a tournament this weekend, and Stormy and I will go out there and support them. Here is a quote from Grif: "I thought of using LRC as our team name a couple weeks before the league started when you posted a picture on your blog of someone wearing the LRC shirt from zazzle.com... I thought that a team of people running around in those shirts would be pretty awesome. Attached you should find a picture of our fine team - in the picture you can see everyone showing our patented hand signal... the "L" (for Lezak obviously)." Here is the picture of the team. Good luck Saturday guys!
Gary