Now that the weather has calmed down from Thursday’s weather it’s time to focus on the weekend and there are some similarities from last weekend. First lets address Saturday.
Southerly winds are going to increase Saturday, probably into the 15-30 mph range. This is all ahead of a cold front approaching us from the west. While we can’t rule out a few showers during the middle of the day Saturday, it’s looking more and more like the bulk of the showers and thunderstorms will hold off until very late in the afternoon. There is concern that some of the storms could be strong. As of Friday morning the Storm Prediction Center has central New York on the edge of the ‘slight risk’ area for Saturday.
Once the front moves through Saturday night we turn much cooler. We’ve been forecasting Sunday temperatures much below normal now for the past few days and as we get closer to the day in question it looks like one chilly air mass headed our way. When coming up with the forecast we are trying to use this past Sunday as the yardstick. On that day we reached 53 degrees with a temperature aloft at 5,000 feet of -2 (
read this previous blog to read why 5,000 feet is so important) . The numbers we see aloft for this Sunday range from -2 to -6 depending on what model you look at. We ended up using somewhat of an average here and gave the strong May sun the nod to at least get us to 50 degrees but it could be a struggle. By the way, the last time we failed to reach at least 50 degrees on a late May day (May 15
th or later) was in 1997.
With it being so cool Sunday during the day we have to throw out some caution about frost by Monday morning. Right now we have 35 in the forecast for Syracuse and you know that outlying areas tend to be colder than Syracuse. A lot will depend on how quickly the wind can die down Sunday night. Make sure you stay tuned to mark and Kyle over the weekend for the latest. You may be thinking of going out and buying your annuals and planting this weekend. However, you may want to hold off on that or at least be prepared to cover those plants Sunday night.
