Everyone has heard by now that their outdoor plans for this weekend are doomed. The weather is going to be nasty. Well, there are indications that this might not be entirely true. I’ve been watching the models this week and one thing I’ve seen in the GFS is a trend toward a slightly drier weekend. That’s not to say it isn’t going to rain, but it looks to me like the weekend as a whole might not be a total washout.
The ECMWF model is acting strange (as usual) and hasn’t been very consistent with handling this system. Each run looks a little different. The NAM is more consistent and shows more rain for us, especially on Saturday. But this is a known bias of the model...it tends to overestimate precipitation amounts a lot of the time. So if we stick to the GFS which has been consistent from run to run this week, this is what we see in today’s mid-day run:
Notice how central Kentucky is shaded in the lightest green color on the scale. This is the 24-hour total precipitation chart, valid close to midnight on Sunday. So, basically this map shows you how much rainfall the model is predicting will fall throughout the entire day on Saturday. The light green shading represents 0.01 to 0.10” of rainfall. A tenth of an inch of rainfall in the course of an entire day isn’t much.
The point here is that the bluegrass area of Kentucky might not see outdoor plans totally wrecked this weekend. While clouds and a chance of rain will be with us, there is also a chance that a lot of us will see very little rain. Right now I would go with a 50% chance of rain in the Lexington area and surrounding counties, but later model runs may trend drier or wetter so we’ll keep watching it. For the time being, if you have outdoor plans don’t cancel them just yet.
-Shawn
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