The first part of the holiday weekend hinges on a couple of cold fronts. The first one moves through Friday. Normally a cold front coming through on the heels of a hot spell like we are going through now is going to cause some fireworks. However, the winds aloft aren’t all that strong and (more importantly) there isn’t a whole lot of moisture for the front to work with. The last few days we’ve been hard pressed to find much rainfall Friday in central New York on our computer models. That’s why we are keeping just a low chance of thunder in for tomorrow’s forecast. The ‘best’ chance will be from Syracuse south.
How does the picture look for the rest of the Memorial Day weekend? It started to get clearer Thursday when the computer models finally started to latch onto a second cold front moving through the region by Saturday evening. Even though the moisture isn’t abundant with this front either, the fact it is coming through late in the day made us put a scattered thunderstorm Saturday afternoon. Since the coverage of storms won’t be widespread I wouldn’t go cancelling any outdoor plans Saturday at this point. Just keep an eye to the sky.
The good news is once this front moves through, drier air should begin to push in from Canada for the final 2/3 of the holiday weekend (Sunday and Monday) If the timing of this front holds then we’ve got good weather. By the way, temperatures should be more seasonable, at or a bit better than 70 degrees both days.
One other note: we could get into some tropical rains by Tuesday or Wednesday next week. A couple areas of low pressure been moving close to Florida the last couple of days with rainfall of 5-12” over the northern part of the state. They will merge into one low. So far the Hurricane Center does not think this will become a tropical system as it heads west into the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever form this low takes, it will hit the mid Gulf Coast by the end of the Memorial Day weekend and head north. It’s way to early to project exactly where this system will go after that but our thinking is it will close enough to bring showers and thunderstorms into central new York Tuesday and Wednesday.
