Good afternoon bloggers,
The first post of the work week is a bit late today. I had a few other things I was working on this morning, so sorry about the later blog entry. The Olympics have been tremendous for a ratings boost of NBC, and NBC Action News. I was at the Power & Light District when Phelps won his 8th gold medal, with the help of a Lezak (maybe a distant cousin). It was exciting, and just being out there in downtown KC was amazing. We have a nice place to go and have fun in downtown, right across the street from the Sprint Center. And, I was out supporting the LRC Ultimate Frisbee team on Saturday. They didn't do so well in the tournament, but I will show some of the video tonight at 6 PM of them scoring a point. Here is a picture of some of the members as they took a timeout, at the time leading 3-1:

O.K., back to the title of this blog entry......."Here it comes?". The upper low that we thought could bring us a lot of rain, and ended up leaving us the exact opposite, dry, is finally about to make a move our way. We will be spending a lot of our weather time on this tonight at 5, 6, and 11 PM (after the Olympics) if these trends continue. Look below at the latest GFS forecast for Wednesday evening:

You can see "Fay" off the east coast of Florida. Tropical Storm Fay may become a hurricane, but so much of her time has been spent over land she just hasn't had a chance to mature. This is good news for Florida, so far, but we have to watch closely to see if the slow movement over the extremely warm waters may intensify Fay in the coming days. And, you can see our upper low, well I hope it is our upper low as my lawn needs a nice drink of water. This upper low is the one the dropped back over Colorado and now is going to move northeast, possibly right over Kansas City on Thursday. How can it not rain at this time of the year with this kind of a system? KCI has only had 0.17" of rain this month, and sometimes it is tough to break a dry spell. We will be giving it a good test between Wednesday and Thursday. This is looking more impressive with each model run coming out. One last thing you can see is a strong jet streak coming towards the west coast. A series of these new jet streaks, even though the pattern is still strongly related to the LRC from this past year, will be slowly carving out new troughs and ridges and will be the beginning of whatever our next pattern will be. Pay close attention, but please keep in mind that I still strongly believe that next years pattern doesn't really reveal itself until sometime in October to early November.
Have a great start to the week. Good luck to all the kids going back to school. We will be showing the LRC team tonight at 6 PM. And, we will have all of the new data tonight at 11 PM after the Olympics. This week has a much better chance of us starting the late newscast at a more reasonable time!
Gary