Good Thursday morning bloggers,
As severe weather season hangs onto its last breath it is making some loud noise. There is one more storm system that is far enough south to bring us a threat of some severe thunderstorm activity on Friday. Look below at the risks for day 1 and day 2 as issued by the Storm Prediction Center:
A weakening cold front will slowly move across the Kansas City viewing area Friday. A line of scattered thunderstorms will likely form tomorrow afternoon and we will be in the right rear quadrant of an exiting storm and jet stream. The more serious threat of severe thunderstorms will very likely be well off to out east-northeast Friday, but we must watch the western edge of this threat closely. It will heat up ahead of the the weakening cold front/wind shift line on Friday. The dewpoints will likely be in the lower 70s near the frontal zone and thunderstorms will form Friday afternoon right near the wind shift line. The more signficant severe weather threat will more likely be over Illinois and Indiana on Friday ahead of the main upper level storm system.
Summer begins on Sunday. I know I talked about June 15th being the rough end to our severe weather season and the threats should shift north and fade in the coming days and weeks. But, after an almost non-existent severe weather season it seems to want to leave us with a reminder that we actually do live in tornado alley. Yesterday, there was one supercell thunderstorm that tracked across extreme northeast Kansas to just south of St. Joseph and east southeast to near Columbia, MO. As it moved across Norborne, MO nearly 100 mph winds blasted through that town causing some significant damage. There were no injuries again, and even though we have had two damaging severe thunderstorm events this week, no one was hurt which is great news. There were no tornadoes this week in our viewing area which is rather amazing, but farther north yesterday there were tornadoes, a few rather significant. So, let's get through the next two days and the threat of severe weather will finally fade away.
What will this years summer pattern bring? The weather pattern continues to cycle according to this years LRC and it is going to be interesting to see how it plays with summertime. As much as we anaylze the LRC it is still extremely difficult to forecast its affect on our summer weather. If we get any strong feelings on what it appears this years pattern will mean for July, then you know we will share it with you.
Have a great day! I am going to Portland, OR for the AMS (American Meteorological Society) Broadcast Conference next week. I am going to try to take the next two days off, but if severe weather threatens, then I will come in to help Jeremy who will be filling in for me.
Gary
