WEATHER BLOG: Warm Days Ahead

After yet another cool night Thursday night, we will see a moderating trend commence Friday. This is thanks to a large, sluggish, stubborn to move quickly ridge of high pressure in the atmosphere. Over the past few days, we had seen the ridge axis to our west, which led to northwest flow at the surface and very chilly air aloft. This allowed some self-destructing sunshine in the morning, destabilizes the atmosphere and caused more clouds in the p.m. as compared to the a.m.

Anyways, the ridge axis is centered very close to the area. This will lead to warming as there is a good amount of sunshine over the area and this strong April sunshine continues to warm up this dry airmass in place. Winds will be light so it will feel nice out. This pattern continues Friday night and it will be several degrees warmer as well.

As the ridge axis shifts to our east this weekend, we will see the wind to shift to southwest. This will allow for a dramatic warmup to much above average levels.

With this ridging in place across the East, all the active weather will be over the Rockies and will eventually translate into the Plains. As it does so, it runs into the ridge. This energy can not barge full bore into the ridge, so it has to go around it. Thus, we will see some moisture stream eastward along a boundary that separates the cooler, drier airmass that had been in place to much warmer and a bit more humid airmass that has been found over the Mississippi valley. Thus, maybe there is a slight risk of a shower on Saturday night, but more likely than not it will remain dry though we will see some clouds result.

We should stay on the south side of this boundary throughout the forecast period of Saturday through Tuesday and thus we stay on the warm and dry side of things. There may be a time period with down-sloping winds and plenty of sun and we may exceed the temperatures that we saw in the very mild month of March. We will get near 90 any day. In any case, there will likely be a high fire danger with sunshine, warm temperatures, windy conditions and not much rain recently.