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Forecast Discussion:
To use an old joke of mine; I'm issuing a nice-weather alert for today and tomorrow (Tue and Wed). We have high pressure over the state (and a big ridge aloft). We break 70F today. Wonderful. Tomorrow will be even warmer.
The longer range forecast:
Our big, approaching, late week Spring storm is visible out in the Pacific in Figure 1 and in Figure 2, the water vapor satellite image. The rivers of moisture from the warm (El Nino) tropics are flowing up shown by the dark green arrows. Figure 3 is our standard 10 day graphical glance and the wonderful warmth holds even into Thursday AM before the next system splashes in.
Figure 3 shows a day and a half of robust precipitation chances with another batch of energy moving in Saturday overnight. The upper air map for Sunday morning shows the closed low right overhead and fairly strong trough in place (Figure 4). Temperatures are fairly warm, for a storm, this time of year.
We'll look at a wider range of models in later posts this week, but the weatherunderground model and GFS are good early indicators of what might happen. The weatherunderground model has 4/10ths of an inch of rain and less than an inch of snow by Sunday morning. This seems very under-done to me.
The GFS (Figure 5) has a very healthy 1.5 inches of water and 3-4 inches of snow by Sunday morning. That might be over-done, but, again, we'll keep an eye on it. I'm planning on the first camping outing of the year... I might need ponchos.
