Real-time Bowling Green Weather Radar
Yesterday’s Weather
Yesterday’s weather was, well, not as stormy as I expect. Our issue this week has been a lack of a trigger, which has kept us relatively quiet with respect to the environment around us. That’ll change this weekend. Anyways, our high yesterday hit 90°F at the airport, with no precip.
Forecast Summary
Today: Partly cloudy skies, with isolated storms possible. Highs around 92°F. Overnight, look for partly cloudy skies to remain, with lows around 76°F.
- Bus Stop: ⛅️ 78°F
- Lunch Hour: 🌤 89°F
- School Lets Out: 🌤/⛈ 92°F
- Evening time: 🌤/⛈ 88°F
Tomorrow: Partly to mostly cloudy, with scattered thunderstorms. Heavy rainfall is likely. Highs around 87°F. Overnight, look for isolated storms to continue, with lows falling to around 75°F.
- Wake up: 🌤 77°F
- Lunch Hour: ⛅️/⛈ 86°F
- Evening time: ⛅️/⛈ 84°F
Sunday: Partly cloudy, with scattered storms. Heavy rainfall is likely. Highs around 86°F. Overnight, watch for isolated storms, with lows around 73°F.
- Wake up: 🌤 76°F
- Lunch Hour: 🌤/⛈ 85°F
- Evening time: 🌤/⛈ 83°F
Discussion
Well, this certainly is a difficult forecast to make.
Today’s isn’t, though! I can be happy about that, for sure. Like the past few days, we are still underneath a tropically influenced airmass, with high moisture content across the region.
This will likely yield, with any day-time heating, an unstable and buoyant atmosphere. With any differential heating this afternoon, we’ll see the possibility of an isolated thunderstorm or two; however, the threat won’t be very widespread. Highs will likely end up in the lower 90s.
Overnight, look for partly cloudy skies, with lows in the mid 70s. Tomorrow and Sunday are when we start to cook with interesting meteorology.
The set up is fairly simple, and isn’t too different from the one that we have seen all week. To our east, there is an anomalously strong high pressure system off the east coast that extends its strength into the Mid-Atlantic. This has allowed for the tropical mid and low level low to fester an slowly move across the Gulf Coast, as weak atmospheric flow has been present all week.
Well, a shortwave is currently propagating east-southeastward, and is set to draw significant influence from, and absorb as well, the Gulf low. This will advect highly anomalous amounts of moisture northward towards the region. Some model ensembles are painting Precipitable Water (PWAT) values being up to 3 standard deviations above normal for this time of year, which raises concern for heavy rainfall and flooding on Saturday and Sunday. Precipitable Water is essentially the measure of the total amount of liquid in the atmosphere at once, and if the entire column was rained out, that amount of liquid would fall.
One of the major challenges with this forecast is that the models are still disagreeing on the axis of heaviest precipitation on Saturday and Sunday. The GFS and its ensembles tend to push the precip from Arkansas through southern Missouri and into southern Indiana. The NAM and SREF ensembles are placing the heaviest axis through, or just west of, SoKY, providing heavy rainfall across the region. I don’t buy an axis of rainfall running directly through southern KY, but I do believe that the heavy rainfall axis will set up to our west through western KY.
I don’t anticipate that SoKY will see the brunt of the rainfall, but I do think that we will see heavy rainfall and thunderstorms this weekend at some point. We’ll likely see scattered to widespread thunderstorms both days, as the moisture plume and forcing will be there on both days.
Any storms that sit over an area for a lengthy amount of time, anticipate flash flooding issues developing across that region. Highs both days will be in the mid and upper 80s. Lows overnight will end up falling into the low to mid 70s.
Extended Outlook
Phew! That was something. After Sunday, we look to have storm chances through Tuesday, but a bit of clearing after that. The CPC is expecting a cooler period coming up, with higher precipitation than normal (but what is new?).
Thats all I have for ya! Thanks for checking into WxOrNotBG this morning, and be sure to follow @WxOrNotBG and @WKUweather on Twitter and like Landon Hampton on Facebook for the latest Bowling Green Weather information. Have a great day folks!