Tuesday Weekly Weather Summary: A Summer Week Ahead With Some Storms

Good morning everybody. I hope everyone had an enjoyable Memorial Day weekend and had some time to relax. It was a perfect transition into kicking off summer this weekend as temps have been gradually increasing and will stay elevated all week. 

A large ridge of high pressure is currently over our area bringing with it warm and now humid conditions. This air mass will be responsible for temps in the 80's all week. It will probably hit 90 in spots as well over the next two days. As this warm and humid air mass sits over our area we have to focus on a cold front that will approach the region tomorrow night..

Anytime we see a low pressure system up in southern Canada (in this case just north of the lakes) during the summer months we know that its cold front is on its way. When you have cooler air running into a warm moist air mass you have the potential for storms to develop. Its not always as simple as that of course. You also need the proper "instability" in the atmosphere to fire up the storms. For example, if you have a elevated layer of warm air above the surface it can prevent air parcels from rising thus cutting off the development of storms. 

In the case of tomorrow, it looks like the environment will be ripe for some storm development. I do not expect very strong storms however. Below is the instability profile for Wednesday..

Without getting too technical these are values for the "lifted index" which is the temp difference between an air parcel and its surrounding environment. The image above shows that there will be some lift or instability but not anything in the severe category. 

To drill down further here is a high resolution model's projection of the storm line for tomorrow eve/night..

Lets see how this plays out.

After we get though tomorrow, the cold front will stall off shore and we will have more shots at some unsettled weather heading towards the weekend. I will update on the weekend of course as we approach.

Don't forget, sometime this week (when time permits) I am going to do a special post on El Nino and how it effects our weather pattern. This is due to an El Nino pattern that is currently developing.

Stay tuned!