Friday, October 11, 2013

Warm, Isolated Showers This Weekend

By Jay Grymes & Steve Caparotta

Titan9 Doppler has been picking-up on a few quick moving showers this afternoon, but nothing to warrant concern.  In addition, it looks like the isolated rains will steer clear of downtown Baton Rouge, so ‘Live After Five’ should run without a hitch ... and most of these passing showers should be over by sunset if not before, leaving high school football in great shape for the evening.
We’ll go to partly cloudy skies tonight, with some patchy fog developing into the early morning hours.  However, we don’t think the fog will be as widespread or as dense as was the case for the past two mornings.  We’ll kick-off Saturday’s sunrise in the mid 60°s for most of metro Baton Rouge.
Two football games in town:  LSU kicks off at about 2:30pm and Southern starts at 6:00pm -- so be ready for some significant traffic around the Red Stick for the better part of the day.  Saturday’s highs will reach the upper 80°s for many of us under partly cloudy skies.  And like today, we can’t rule out spotty showers during the afternoon, but the vast majority of us stay dry.  And even for those that do see some rain, the showers will pass in a hurry and won’t be much of a problem for any outdoor activities.

Our Sunday forecast isn’t much different: sun-up temps in the mid to upper 60°s, afternoon highs in the upper 80°s, and less than a 20% chance for rain in your backyard.
If there is a disappointment, it’s that we can’t get rid of this higher humidity.  A frontal system will remain positioned to out north and northwest into the middle of next week, keeping us in the “warm sector” with flow off the Gulf maintaining low-level moisture.  Morning lows will be in the mid to upper 60°s into the middle of the week -- a sign of elevated dew points and Gulf humidity.
The outlook for the upcoming mid-week is still a bit fuzzy.  The long-range outlooks indicate that a Canadian front will push through the lower Mississippi Valley -- most likely around Thursday -- but the timing is still far from certain.  But once the front gets through, we should be set-up for some good-looking, cooler and less-humid weather for NEXT weekend!
In the tropics, we’re still watching a large disturbance currently in the central tropical Atlantic, roughly mid-way between Africa and the Lesser Antilles.  The National Hurricane Center gives this large wave a 50-50 chance of becoming a tropical cyclone (a tropical depression or possibly a tropical storm) over the next 5 days as it continues to move to the west or WNW at about 10-15 mph.  At this stage, however, given its location, it is simply not something that Gulf interests need to worry about.

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