I’m looking at my surface analysis late this morning and there is a fairly potent system located near St. Louis, Missouri. This low is forecast to move into Pennsylvania later this evening then into southeast New York Friday morning. This is a track favorable for some steady, perhaps heavy, rain here in central New York.
There are a couple of things aloft that are adding more credence to the forecast of heavy rain tonight. First, there a strong disturbance in the jet stream winds aloft that will move through. Second, with the strongest winds at the jet stream level passing just to our north, central New York will be in a favorable area of divergent winds aloft. This will just help in the development of showers and storms that will be very productive in terms of rain.
While there may be some showers and thunderstorms around this afternoon and early this evening we don’t think the ‘main act’ gets going until around midnight. The heaviest rain will last from midnight until about 7 or 8 AM. How much rain falls tonight? We think a large part of the region will see around an inch of rain. The tough part at this point is trying to figure out where some of these pockets of heaviest rain falls. In those areas a couple of inches could fall and right now we don’t know exactly where that is going to fall. While the computer models for the last few days have consistently put widespread rain over us the position of the heaviest rain has varied from day to day. One model run puts it over Lake Ontario, the next over CNY then the following one over the southern Tier. Check back with Dave Longley later today or this evening for the latest.
Now it has been fairly dry here the last 4 to 6 weeks but that amount of rain in a six to eight hour period could cause some flooding concerns on a local level. Be alert later tonight if you live in a low lying or flood prone area.
