5/10 – The Chief’s “Clearing Skies, Lovely Day” Friday Morning Forecast

Cold front is moving through the area this morning and will be slow to do so. Dry air will move over the area bringing cloud cover to an end later this morning with a cooler/drier wind from the NW. Upper level high pressure to the NW near Alaska today will eventually begin to build into the NW CONUS by late today, this will in turn force the upper trough from Cali through the inner-mountain west to begin moving SE and orient itself more meridional. The flow over our area will be zonal today through Saturday but as the upper weakness gets a bit closer and orients N-S, it will cause a strong divergent area, This will set the stage for several disturbances to be produced after Saturday as there will be more upper support for these storms to develop.

Early Sunday, we should see the surface front slowly begin to lift northward making it to the coast Sunday night and to the NE of the area by noon Monday. This will help our area have more surface based instability starting late Sunday into much of the week. The problem with each of these disturbances is to find where they will be each day so we will know which areas will most likely get storms and watering. Each one of these disturbances will be fully capable of producing severe storms and very heavy rainfall. They are expected to be transitory,  but there could still be some nuisance flooding with heavy rain.