Friday Morning Weather Update: Steady Rain Today Gives Way to Clearing Saturday

Good morning everyone. Well, the rain certainly lived up to its hype this week. Right now the region is under a steady rain as an upper level low pressure center pulls a surface low towards the coast. You can see current radar below..

This continues through the morning and by the mid afternoon we have scattered showers..

You can see the upper low that is causing this below..

This starts to slowly fizzle out tomorrow morning leaving behind a few showers which should eventually lead to clearing by Saturday early afternoon. 

So why has the weather been so miserable this week? The answer is that the atmosphere is "clogged up" due to an omega blocking pattern. What is an omega blocking pattern? Take a look below..

We have high pressure ridge (red) out off coast of CA, a trough of low pressure over the west, a ridge of high pressure in the central us and finally a trough over the east. Notice this forms a similar shape to the greek letter omega. This blocking which I specifically indicated by the black lines causes the flow of the atmosphere to slow down. When the flow slows down energy can consolidate and we get long peroids of unsettled weather. If this was the winter boy we would be having fun. Then again, as we enter late spring the jet is weakening so that means shorter wavelengths. 

On Saturday night into Sunday morning another front does sweep through which will cause some showers..

This should be all cleared by mid day. 

Looking to next week we might have more unsettled weather on tap unfortunately as more blocking is evident on long range models. However it does appear by mid May this pattern should break and we go into our traditional late spring warm weather.

Thanks for reading.