Any early ideas for Memorial Day? (5-16-12)

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Reported by: Jim Teske

Email: stormteam@9wsyr.com

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Published: 5/16/2012 5:41 pm

Updated: 5/16/2012 5:45 pm

It’s not in our 7 day forecast but once we get into the weekend we’ll have our first look at the Memorial Day weekend forecast. Still, that doesn’t stop us looking at some of our computer model guidance that looks beyond 7 days. In particular, the GFS model looks out about two weeks in time. When we look that far out in time we aren’t focusing so much on details but instead looking at trends and consistency. So what do we see from the GFS for Memorial Day? A whole lot of inconsistency! Over the last 18 hours there have been 3 different runs of the GFS with 3 very different solutions for Memorial Day. Take a look:

The run from last evening looked rather promising with a nice sunny day. Now fast forward to the next run of the GFS that came out just 6 hours later:

Wow! What a difference. This scenario is very wet for us. It shows you how small differences in the initial conditions that are inputted to the computer can amplify over time and we end up with a much different solution from model run to model run. Finally, here is the run of the model we looked at here in the office this afternoon.

Another computer model run, another solution. It may not be the heavy rain of the second solution above but there would be showers and thunderstorms around.

The bottom line is it is too early to pick up on a trend for Memorial Day. And the flip flopping from the computer models is one of the reasons we don’t do a forecast beyond 7 days. You may find a 10, 15 or 20 day forecast out there on the web but as long as the models behave like the panels above you’ll probably find those forecasts unreliable. Like I said, we’ll wait until this upcoming weekend and hopefully we’ll at least have a more consistent picture from the GFS.

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