Tired of hot sun? Careful what you wish

Summer is not going down without a fight and atmospheric fights between air masses mean stalled fronts and wet weather. We hope you enjoyed the late summer warmth and more bearable humidity. Now act like Eskimo children in October and get prepared to say “Bye, bye” to Mr. Sun for a very long time. Alright, you can skip the parka.

For most of us, Mr. Sun will start to disappear Thursday mid-day as scattered showers and storms move up from the Gulf. Friday will feature an even better chance of more substantial showers and storms, with more substantial cloud cover, but still a peep or two of our old sunny friend. The best chance for the deluge should be anytime Saturday and Sunday morning. This ECMWF forecast map shows a trough of low pressure in the Western Gulf along with onshore flow and that plume of moisture headed our way from the Yucatan. The yellows and red show where the model thinks the heaviest storms will be, but the key here is to see the forest not the trees. Here the forest is an atmospheric river that screams out several inches of rain for almost everyone.

The bad news is the front depicted above from the Dallas area northeast to Kentucky comes down and stalls in the Northern Gulf right at the coastline or slightly offshore. This is the same map shown for next Tuesday noon showing the east-west front with its green area showing the light rain or scattered showers. Though the showers will taper off on the Northshore sometime early next week (late Monday, early Tuesday?), the clouds will persist for another day for two with only fleeting breaks. Highs will be noticeably cooler, low 80s.

The Foreca graphic looks good, except I think they underplay the shower chance on Thursday afternoon. Showers should start on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the morning hours on Thursday and spread inland and westward during the day. Friday’s showers and storms will start a few hours earlier and be more widespread.

Even though it won’t be raining all the time, it will be very difficult to plan anything outdoors this weekend. It will be almost impossible to time the small scale batches of showers moving through — so keep your radar apps handy if you need to know. Suffice it to say Saturday and early Sunday look wet.

Notice the big jump in low temperatures for Thursday indicating the increased humidity and cloud cover. Though highs come down, lows stay up until the front sags south of us sometime on Monday. Then, both the high and lows come down a few degrees.

The European model eventually clears us out next Thursday giving us a few nice days of mostly sunny weather with highs low 80s, lows near 60 — but it’s far from certain.

Some of the models want to kick up a tropical storm in the Western Gulf off the front as it sags into the middle of the Gulf by late next week. That seems unlikely to me. Even if this happens, the odds are that it would head towards Florida.

Wow - what a really bad beach weekend for the South Alabama - Pensacola Beach area. Winds will kick the surf up through Sunday and the showers and storms will roll in. Though the wind and surf won’t be quite as bad in areas east of Destin, shower chances are still high.