Monday Weekly Weather Summary: Warm Weather Gives Way to Seasonable Conditions, Severe Weather In Heartland

Good morning everyone. It ended up being a beautiful weekend with the exception of some lingering showers on Saturday morning. As we head into the front part of this week we will have more beautiful conditions today with temperatures in the mid 70's. 

As we head into tomorrow we will have some unsettled weather move our way with showers and Thunderstorms possible through tomorrow night..

Notice the colder air in New England. This is not snow for anyplace but the  Green and White mountains Tuesday. I do expect those ski areas to see some flakes mixed with rain as there are arctic origins from the air mass entering the area. Accumulations are possible there. A big part of how the colder air is locked up there is the big blocking high we have over Greenland right now..

This -NAO pattern allows colder air aloft to get trapped near the east as seen by the pocket of blue near New England. However the bigger issue this week lies out west. Take a look at the pocket of blue over Nevada moving towards Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. This represents an upper level low pressure system which will be moving directly into warm moist air. 

When you get cold air aloft running into warm moist air to its east severe weather is in the cards. There are many factors needed to support a severe weather outbreak and on Tuesday many of those will be present for the nations heartland. I am going to go into more detail tonight in a video but he easiest way of showing how unstable the atmosphere will be is by looking at a parameter that shows the potential for how much a parcel of air can rise. The more air rises the more it cools and condenses and the bigger thunderstorms can get. Here is what this parameter  looks like for tomorrow..

Some very extreme values especially over Nebraska and Oklahoma. We also will have a strong sheer or wind direction change from the lower levels to upper levels which will aid in causing the thunderstorms to spin. You can see this below where I circled the difference between winds at 18k feet and 5k feet....

Like I said I will go into more detail on this in a video tonight. 

Moving back to our area, things will clear out by Wednesday. Wednesday will feature sunshine and temperatures in the mid 60's. Clouds move in again on Thursday with the chance at more unsettled weather into Thursday night as the remains of the severe weather maker out west move our way..

More on the severe weather tonight at 8pm.