Friday, May 10, 2013

Flash Flood Watch Continues Through Saturday

By Jay Grymes & Steve Caparotta


Boy, was that a tough way to start off a Friday!  We opened the morning with a Thunderstorm Watch and a series of T-Storm Warnings across the viewing area.  The active weather was accompanied by hyper-active cloud-to-ground lightning as the main clusters of storms passed by, with localized rains of as much as 4” to 5” to 6” to end the work week.




And here at 5PM, we’re still hearing thunder at the studio, the rain continues to fall and there is still more rain on the way between now and Saturday afternoon.
In addition, we’re still waiting on the main cold front to slide by - - that is expected early tomorrow.  But it’s not just the cold front we’ve got to monitor: mid/upper-air disturbances riding through the atmosphere are spawning the period of  heavy rains and t-storms.  The first cluster produced the morning’s severe weather outbreak and we’ve just seen a second round of storms as the second disturbance marches from west to east across south Louisiana.
We’ve got another disturbance over Texas that appears headed our way.  We expect it to arrive early Saturday, delivering another round of locally-heavy rain and storms.
The GFS forecast model is showing an upper-level trough to our west that will leave a “cut-off” low over the Bay of California.  The main upper trough will swing to the east and help clear things out for Mother’s Day and leave us with a great looking first half of the work week.  The cut-off low will linger to our west through the first days of next week, then get picked-up by the upper-level westerlies and track eastward on Wednesday and Thursday, giving us modest rain chances on Thursday as it slides by.

Wishing Moms everywhere an early Happy Mother’s Day!!

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