Lovely Week; Stormy Saturday Night?

The promised cold front overachieved with a few areas near the Mandeville’s Lakefront and Lacombe getting close to an inch while most of the rest of us had a few tenths to a half-inch (a few scattered locations across Northern Hancock and Harrison Counties also had about an inch). The dry cool air feels lovely with tonight’s lows getting down into the upper 40s for many on the Northshore. Sorry, Southshore - you’ll be lucky to get to the upper 50s at the airport. I included a Foreca graphic for Louis Armstrong since I have some Southshore readers.

The beautiful, less humid weather will last through Tuesday with afternoon highs in the 70s. Winds turn around to the southeast, and humidity slowly increases under cloudy skies for Wednesday. Clouds break for Thursday as highs rise into the low 80s and chance of afternoon showers returns for Friday. The next big event might happen Saturday evening or Sunday. A cold front with severe thunderstorms will ravage the Midwest this week and it will be located along the blue dashed line in this ECMWF forecast for Saturday evening well to our north. Even though it won’t make it through, a line of storms will develop and probably propagate (say that three times fast) in our direction (the yellows and reds stretching from Dallas to Hattiesburg show the storms). Often these lines last well into the night before dying. Regardless of whether the line makes it to the I-12/I-10 corridor, storms are also possible on Sunday with the higher chances on the Southshore.

The Foreca graphic shows the gradual warm-up in high temperatures and the big jump in low temperatures (and humidity) from Tuesday to Wednesday. As usual, the highs are a bit too cool. Rainfall timing looks fine, but the amounts could be too low for next weekend. Skies will mostly sunny tomorrow, partly cloudy on Tuesday, mostly cloudy on Wednesday, partly sunny on Thursday and Friday.

Models disagree on the timing of rainfall for the long-range. It is getting to that time of year where small systems predominate and long-range predictability of individual rain events goes down. With that in mind…..

Several models show a decent chance of showers and thunderstorms next Tuesday April 28 followed by less humid weather for a few days. Expect highs in the low 80s and lows in the low 60s. Several models show a cold front coming through May 1 and 2 with showers and thunderstorms then.

May looks to have slightly above average rain and temperature based on what we typically see during the start of a strong El Nino.