9/11 – Rob Knight’s “Tropical Watch” Friday Morning Forecast

Today is a transition day and the beginning of what looks to be a rather wet set up across the region for the next week. The main influence for our region today and through the weekend will be a tropical wave currently moving slowly west across the north-central Gulf. This tropical wave is being monitored by the hurricane center and they currently have a 20% probability of it becoming a tropical cyclone in the next 5 days. Development is not anticipated with this system but what it will do is bring with it very deep moisture into the area.

With this much moisture moving in it won’t take much to spark showers and thunderstorms. Convection will be mostly driven by diurnal fluctuations; over land areas during the day after we heat up and then more numerous over the marine areas overnight where the best instability will be during that time. Rain may be heavy at times especially today and tomorrow before the wave moves west of the region but widespread heavy rain may hold off until the 2nd wave which will be early next week. Even given the amount of moisture moving in models aren’t really hammering the rainfall totals much through the weekend.

Sunday is an interesting forecast. On one hand the tropical wave will be west of the region so we should see some subsidence on the back end of that. In addition the next stronger tropical wave will be entering the Gulf Sunday so we will be between systems that day. This is usually when a break in the activity would occur however; moisture will still be rather plentiful. With that it still might not take much daytime heating to get scattered to numerous showers and thunderstorms. Unsettled weather will continue as we roll into next week.