Scattered Afternoon T-Storms

By Jay Grymes & Steve Caparotta

As of 3:00 PM, we haven’t seen the coverage of rains that we had anticipated yesterday (we were calling for 30% to 40% coverage for this afternoon), but we expect showers and storms to continue to pop-up through the remainder of the afternoon and into the early evening.

Storms at this point are a bit more numerous to the east and south of Baton Rouge, fueled in part by the mid/upper-level low spinning well to our east.  In fact, the weather is very active over southern Mississippi due to its closer proximity to that upper low.

As we’ve mentioned the past couple of days, that upper low is still easing its way to the west, and as it does our rain chances will increase.  At the same time, the low has become a little less “organized” and continues to weaken.  However, we think that enough of the mid-level system will remain intact to slowly increase rain chances for WAFB’s communities over the next couple of days.

As is common during the summer, we’ve got plenty of moisture in the air from the surface into the mid-levels and that will continue through the week.  At the same time, daytime heating through the first half of the day will help de-stabilize the atmosphere and get things rising in the morning with cumulus clouds building well before noon.

For now, we’ll go with a 30% to 40% rain chance for Thursday, with a 40% rain chance for Friday.  Rain chances increase again into the weekend: a 50% to 60% chance of showers and t-storms for your neighborhood on Saturday with a 50-50 rain chance returning for Sunday.

Heading into the early and middle part of next week, we ease back the afternoon rain probabilities to something more isolated to scattered (roughly 30%); not “dry” area-wide, but notably less coverage than what we’re expecting for the weekend.

In the tropics?  After that unusual start with two May ‘named’ storms (Alberto and Beryl), a surprise Hurricane Chris developing north of 40°N latitude, and a ‘misbehaving’ Debby meandering over the northern Gulf, we’ve had a “quiet” past three weeks in the Atlantic Basin.  And the outlook over the next several days looks good, with nothing in the offing any time soon!