Cold Front Brings Rain, Slight Cool-down

A cold front will bring rain and a few rumbles of thunder into NY today through tomorrow morning. A brief period of cooler weather will follow the front into Friday...temps will be about 3-5 degrees below normal, with highs in the lower 40s for Albany. It will quickly warm back up to normal Saturday, and these normal temps (highs in the upper 40s for Albany, with some lower 50s thrown in) will continue through mid-week next week as another ridge takes a seat over the eastern portions of the US.

Yay...another week of boring weather for NY... *sigh*

In my map discussion during class yesterday, I mentioned the possibility of severe weather in the Great Plains for Monday/Tuesday next week due to the trough that will be digging into the southwest US over the weekend. The SPC is on board with this prediction, and issued the outlook today as confidence increased from yesterday.



At this point and time, the situation doesn't look too crazy. Just your typical severe weather pattern here... no real plans to turn into a huge outbreak. The big thing hurting this storm will be the lack up good upper-level lapse rates, which takes a big chunk out of the possible CAPE...otherwise this storm would be a lot scarier. To get this CAPE, the trough will have to dig a bit deeper to tap into the dry upper-level air that the Mexican Plateau has to offer. P-Wat values (provided by the Gulf) are pretty good, and the low-level shear (in the surface-3km range) looks impressive, so it definitely looks like we'll see a few good storms in the Great Plains (and perhaps pushing into the Southeast) Monday and Tuesday.

There is a SLIGHT possibility of getting some severe weather action from this system in NY as it pushes north and east. The main concern will be the strength of the ridge over us as the storm tries to move into NY. If the ridge is too strong, the storm will slide north and just give us some rain. Still, we're talking seven days out at this point, so hopefully a more favorable severe weather forecast will come into play later this week!