Big warm up coming

Hope everyone had a great weekend and enjoyed the refreshing temperatures yesterday!

A few high clouds float through the region throughout the morning, but we'll become sunny this afternoon with highs in the mid 70s.

The cooler temperatures stick around one more day before we see some big changes. Highs will climb from the mid 70s this afternoon to almost 90 this weekend. The reason is the ridge of high pressure providing us pristine weather today will shift eastward and get us into a southerly flow. That southerly flow taps into some Gulf moisture this weekend, which means a stray shower or thunderstorm may bubble up. The Euro is a bit more gung-ho about the rain chances come Saturday & Sunday, hence why I included a chance of rain, albeit a slight one at this time, both those days.



Here's the ridge responsible for our cool temperatures now:

It's over northern Mississippi now, but notice where it is this weekend...:

...out in the Atlantic, bringing us those 90° temperatures Saturday & Sunday.

If you think that's warm, look what a long range model, the GFS and to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt, is showing Memorial Day weekend. That would put many of us in the 90s with a few stray showers.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned a tropical entity in the Caribbean Sea come the last week of May. The models still hint at something developing in either the Caribbean or the eastern Pacific Ocean. If I had to put money on it, I'd say the Pacific storm solution is more plausible as they would already be in their Hurricane Season. The ITCZ, inter-tropical convergence zone, is still pretty far south and would take a rogue tropical wave breaking off and heading in to the Caribbean.

Here's the two different solutions from back to back runs of the GFS, just one of the models I use to forecast:

18Z from May 12:

 

0Z from May 13: