Mid month warm-up? (5-9-12)

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Sunshine (MGN Online)

Reported by: Jim Teske

Email: stormteam@9wsyr.com

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Published: 5/09/2012 5:05 pm

Updated: 5/09/2012 5:12 pm

I’ve been meaning all week to jot down some thoughts about next week’s weather. The problem has been there seemed to be more questions than answers so I decided to wait and let things sort themselves out a bit with the models.

What seems fairly certain at this point is that later next week the main branch of the westerlies (i.e. the jet stream) will be well north over southern Canada. Sounds like a recipe for above normal temperatures, right? I would say so. Here is a look at how far above or below normal temperatures will be at 5,000 feet (850 mb) at the end of next week across North America. This is off the GFS ensembles for next Friday evening (May 18th):

The core of the warm air is forecast to be to our north but central New York should still experience above normal temperatures. To confirm what we are seeing from the GFS here is the 8-14 day forecast for the period May 17-23 from the Climate Prediction Center down in Washington DC.

About the only question at this point is whether this warm up will be a ‘wet’ or ’dry.’ The models for the last couple of days have tried to form low pressure somewhere down over the Deep South. Where this forms and moves will dictate if and when we get any rain here in central New York later next week. What makes it tricky is the fact that it will be cut off from the jet stream and that makes forecasting its movement tough. Fine tuning the position will determine whether we end up closer to 70 with showers and storms or dry and 80 the end of next week/weekend. More on this in the days to come. It’s still too early to say with any certainty whether this will hold into the following weekend which will be Memorial Day weekend.

One other note is the possibility of the hurricane season getting a jump start just before Memorial Day. The GFS model actually forecasts out 16 days into the future. I will caution that once you get beyond 7 or 10 days the models reliability drops quite a bit but I did find it interesting that both last night and again this morning the GFS formed a tropical system off the Florida Coast in the days leading up to Memorial. Odds are the next couple GFS runs won’t even show something tropical in this same location around this same time but let’s file away what the GFS is saying now and revisit the set up next week.

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