Warmer Weather Ahead?

Some of you may be starting to think about that first cutting of hay.  Does the weather forecast look good for cutting hay?

For starters, the weather pattern does look like it's going to go through a significant change.  Here's the weather map for yesterday (Saturday).  You can see the cold trough of low pressure over the western half of the country.


Just three days later (Tuesday), that pattern is significantly different.  A warm ridge of high pressure has developed in the West.  But there's a cold trough just off shore.


By Wednesday afternoon, this off shore trough will move inland.  So the warm 70s on Monday and Tuesday will drop back into the 60s.  Things will also be breezy during this transition, especially on Wednesday.


Will there be any rain with this trough?  In short, there will be some showers during the next few days.  None of these showers look really wet, but there is an outside chance of a shower that would be not be nice to a field of mown hay, especially north of Deer Park.  The image below shows the chance of rain starting as early as early Tuesday morning, and continuing through Thursday evening.



After this midweek cool trough, high pressure again builds over the western US.  The image below is for Tuesday 4 June.  But again, notice that there's another cold trough of low pressure over the Gulf of Alaska.  The Pacific Northwest is caught in between the cool and the warm.  What kind of weather will this pattern bring?


The image above is the average of 50 different forecasts.  But we've talked in the past that there are ways mathematical ways to see if there are different scenarios instead of just looking at the average.  The image below shows those different scenarios.  Clusters #1 (upper left) and #3 (upper right) show the cool trough pushing onshore, while Clusters #2 (top center) and #4 (lower left) favor the warm high pressure.  And the number of forecasts in the warm vs cold scenario is right about 50:50.  In other words, we just don't know at this point which pattern will win out.


The Climate Prediction Center has tried their best to depict this uncertainty.  The Inland Northwest is stuck between a wet and dry forecast.  



Looking even farther into the future, there appears to be decent consensus of even warmer and drier weather around 9 June.  We'll keep an eye on this forecast and see it will become a reality.




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