A bit cooler this weekend

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Get out and enjoy this weekend. After an early summer feel to Friday, highs will drop back down into the 70s with less humidity. 80-degree weather will return along with more humidity and a chance for afternoon showers each day next week. These scattered showers aren’t associated with any front or system, so it’s going to be hard to say who sees the brief light showers and who won’t.

Easter weekend looks like a challenging forecast with the first significant system approaching the area in a long time.

The Foreca graphic shows the slightly cooler weather over the weekend, courtesy of a dying cold front that moves through without any rain Friday night. So, enjoy the return back to spring to get some things done around the yard since Easter weekend is always busy and the weather looks “if-fy”.

Next week’s afternoon showers will be scattered. My take is that you may see light showers on half of those days. By next Friday, you might see a few tenths of an inch.

Big differences on how the American GFS and European ECMWF model are handling the system approaching from the west on Easter Weekend. GFS has a washout of a weekend with several bands of showers and storms moving through from Good Friday to Easter morning. ECMWF, which normally performs better, holds the front off until late Easter Sunday (all my pastor friends are shouting Hallelujah at this point). Systems tend to move slower than models indicate at this time of year which is another reason to favor the ECMWF. Regardless of timing, this is our best chance to pick up a half inch or more in over two weeks.

After that, some cooler air will move in with highs in the 70s and lows in the upper 40s to mid 50s for the Monday - Wednesday after Easter.

So why the difference between models? It’s not that the American meteorologists have become lazy, incompetent bureaucrats. It’s really more about how we choose to use our computer power. In Europe, there are fewer small scale systems than produce thunderstorms or result from thunderstorms. So, they can afford to slow cook their models using great physics and precise mathematics to aim for a better 10-day forecast. In America, no such luck. We have many more thunderstorms (and hurricanes) , so we need to run different models ( to help forecasters and aviators) and run them more often thus chewing up our computer time. So when the American GFS gets out to about 8 days, it runs out of time and uses poorer physics and math to just get done with it — about like most of us approached our math homework!