Good Thursday, folks. Thunderstorms caused a few issues on Wednesday and that’s just the beginning of a very active setup. Rounds of showers and thunderstorms will be common over the next few days, with more widespread action coming this weekend as what’s left of Gordon rolls into the region.
Today’s storms will go up pretty quickly and be in clusters. These storms will have two main calling cards… a lot of lightning and torrential rains. These storms may produce a few inches of rain in less than an hour, bringing a local flash flood threat.
Track away…
A cold front is settling into the region from the northwest. This front will be the forcing mechanism to force this tropical air to rise, bringing some hefty rain numbers through Friday. Just like today, the Friday storms will be loaded with lightning and may cause local flash flooding.
The front hangs around into the weekend as the remnant low from Gordon works from Missouri into the Ohio Valley. The setup is there for a lot of rain to fall across our region from Saturday through early Monday. It won’t rain the entire time, but the threat for showers and storms will really increase compared to what we are seeing now…
Strong/severe storms are possible, but the flood threat is the top dog of the weather weekend…
Once that system departs, a boundary remains across our region and will stretch into the Gulf of Mexico. This will be a river of tropical moisture capable of spitting out more heavy rain producing showers and storms.
As this is happening, the east coast will be on high alert from a possible impact from Hurricane Florence…
Florence is a major hurricane and will likely stay that way through next week. Watch how the models turn Florence into a monster storm threatening the east coast. Here’s the GFS…
The Canadian…
I will update things later today. Until then, make it a good one and take care.
Maybe not identical, Florence reminds me a lot in size and current path similarity to Hugo from way back in 89. I can barely remember all the heavy rain and gusty winds we received in Harlan as I was only 7 at the time, but Hugo plowed up through the Carolinas and was still a tropical storm up to SW VA!. It would be unimaginablely wild if Florence also ends up raining on KY after Gordon’s tropical moisture hits first!
Looks like the high pressure we currently have will place most of the main action to the north of Kentucky. Hugo and the system a few years ago didn’t have that as a barrier to Kentucky. That’s my positive spin 🙂
If the Canadian model would be the one to verify, is there a guesstimation on when that would make landfall?
I am not too concerned about either the remnants of Gordon or Hurricane Florence on our weather here in the Ohio Valley. We need to look forward to see if this summer weather will ever end ? The only thing that’s changed is our day length. I am more concerned about climate change which I think has been occurring since the last Ice Age. More extreme weather events have been occurring way too often. Not just here but over the entire Earth. No one really knows what our normal weather is suppose to be ? Maybe the weather we are having now is normal, or the weather we had back in 1977-78 is our normal ? One thing though, meteorology is a more fascinating subject to study with all the weather extremes taking place. As I look back I wish I would have majored in meteorology instead of Agriculture. Oh well one of the many mistakes I made in my life.
Right now, the NWS updates its 30-year mean every 10 years, currently we are using the 1981-2010 to determine what’s normal. Just think about this one: in a few years, we will be using the 1991-2020 averages to determine what’s normal. For Louisville, when we do use this gauge, we already have 8 months falling between those years since 1991 that are the warmest for its respective month (Feb 2017; Mar 2012; Apr 2017; May 2018; Jun 2010; Jul 2012; Aug 2007; Oct 2016.
Of the 148 entries for the top ten warmest months in Louisville, dating back to 1871, or nearly 147 years, 39 of those 148 entries have occurred since 1991, a period of nearly 27 years.
Yeah and if the official temperature reading for Louisville was not taken at SDF a good majority of those records would be safe.
Noticed over on mesonet that the “heat index” feature is no longer there. Does it automatically go off once we get to September? If so that’s kinda dumb. Dew point of 77 the last two evenings in my area, Never sweat so much in my life.
It’s still there…Louisa had a temperature of 93 recently, dewpoint was 71, so the heat index was 101. So, it appears in the same section called “other” under “wind chill, but you have to click on “wind chill” to get the heat index. Brrrr, that 101 degree wind chill is refreshing….?