More Mild & Dry Days Ahead!

WAFB First Alert Quickcast:
- mild-and-dry autumn weather continues
- upper 70°s to low 80°s for highs each day
- watching a broad low pressure area in the southern Gulf
 
The past several days have served as a textbook explanation of why October is my favorite south Louisiana month (as long as the tropics are behaving) ... and there is much more of this great fall weather ahead for our viewing area.
 
Our forecast remains rain-free right through the upcoming weekend and the temperatures and humidity will cooperate as well.  Mornings for the Red Stick will see sun-up temperatures in the 50°s with afternoon highs in the upper 70°s to low 80°s -- all along, dew points will remain in the very comfortable range.  Two words come to mind: nearly perfect!

Any weather action over the U.S. during the week will remain to the north.  We’ll get yet another ‘dry’ cold front sliding through the region early Wednesday (what some would call a ‘backdoor’ cold front from the northeast), serving to bolster our run and fair weather and low humidity with a dose of ‘continental’ (Canadian) air.  After Wednesday’s front, surface high pressure over the central U.S. remains in charge through the weekend, with the extended outlook suggesting that another ‘backdoor’ front moves through late Sunday or early Monday.
 
Our forecast this week calls for mainly sunny skies just about every day.  Right now, it looks like Wednesday’s front will be just too dry to produce more than a few fair-weather clouds on its way by.  Headed into the weekend, we can expect a few more clouds each afternoon, but even then it looks like fair to partly-cloudy skies for the mid-days and afternoons.  No complaints . . .
 
If you’ve been watching closely, the First Alert team has been mentioning a low pressure mess in and around the southwestern Gulf for several days now.  Currently the National Hurricane Center (NHC) is posting an area in the southern Bay of Campeche with a 50% chance of tropical (or sub-tropical) development in the next two days with those percentages at 60% over the next five days.  There are several features at play here: remnants from what was the East-Pacific’s short-lived T.S. Trudy, moisture surging northwards from the western Caribbean, and a ‘semi-stalled’ front draped SW-to-NE across the southern and central Gulf. 

 

And it could be more than five days before something actually does develop, if at all.  The majority of our models have the low-pressure blob hanging around the Bay of Campeche and the Yucatan Peninsula for the next 4-5 days.  More importantly for Louisiana interests, if something were to form somewhere over the southern Gulf in the next five to seven days, it would almost certainly move east, becoming more of a problem for Florida (and Cuba) and unlikely to seriously impact the Central Gulf Coast.

 
So let’s enjoy our local autumn weather . . . and for now, not worry about the tropics.