Monday Morning Weather Discussion: A Hot Humid Start to the Week, Severe Weather Possible Tuesday

Good morning everyone. I will start by saying the weekend forecast was a disaster. For one it did not rain as much as expected and the timing was completely off.  Models significantly overestimated the rainfall amounts. The good news was that Sunday ended up being an excellent day unexpectedly.

The news this week will be the very hot and humid conditions  along with a potential severe thunderstorm threat tomorrow. By the time we get to the end of the week things will cool down a little but we can see some more showers Friday.

Lets look at tomorrows thunderstorm set up. You can see below the temperatures ahead of an approaching cold front..

This hot moisture filled air is going to be ingredient #1 as a cold front then comes approaching from the west. On the next image below you can see the high resolution NAM model's projection of storms popping up along the front..

Notice the low pressure system up in Quebec. That is what the cold front is associated with. 

To determine how severe a thunderstorm event may be, we need to look at how unstable the atmosphere will be. In other words what is the temperate of an air parcel compared to its surrounding environment. If it is much warmer than the environment then it rises causing those big storm clouds building high up in the atmosphere. We can determine the potential for this by using an index called CAPE. Below shows the instability for tomorrow afternoon. Just know the closer to red the more unstable the atmosphere is..

Could this be one of the bigger severe weather event for the east coast this year? I am not sure yet but it is work monitoring and I will have another update on this tonight or tomorrow morning.

Thanks for checking in.