Good Saturday, everyone. We continue to feel the steam settling back into the bluegrass state, with increasing amounts of showers and thunderstorms kicking in. This action could wind up causing a few issues in the coming days, and could be a signal for the summer just beginning.

Let’s begin with today and roll forward. Highs will be back in the mid and upper 80s for many, with scattered showers and storms going up. A few of the storms may be strong or locally severe. Here’s today’s outlook from the Storm Prediction Center…

Additional rounds of showers and storms will be with us on Sunday and last into, at least, the first half of next week. Once again, some of the storms may be strong and put down heavy rainfall. The models are pointing toward this potential…

That’s from the new version of the GFS and shows the northwest to southeast orientation of the heaviest rains. If we add the following week to the mix, you can see a continuation of that setup…

We are clearly going back into the flash flood “look” over the next few weeks. I will have your tracking toys in a bit. First, let’s talk about the summer that’s just underway.

The early Summer trend is for the heat to be in the western Mississippi Valley down into Texas. Cool shots have been showing up from the Ohio Valley north and east. That may very well be the signal for much of the summer. The European Weeklies through July 23rd show this well. Here are the temperature departures…

That puts Kentucky in the near normal category, but also puts us in the very wet category…

Those numbers are way above normal for our region…

The control run of the European through the same time period is even wetter…

This kind of setup would lead to a very active summer thunderstorms season, with flash flood potential written all over it.

Speaking of storms, track what’s out there today…

Current watches
Current Watches

Possible watch areas
Current MDs

Have a great Saturday and take care.