Good Friday everyone. We’ve finally made it to the end of the week and we have the weekend staring us straight in the face. A cold front is sweeping across the state today and will usher in cool temps over the next few days. This round of cool is a prelude to a few rounds of chill we have rolling our way over the next few weeks.
I have really been hitting this early season chilly pattern very had over the past few weeks and others are now joining the September version of the Roscoe P. Cold-train. 🙂
Our cold front doesn’t have a ton of juice with it, but should still be able to touch off a scattered shower or thunderstorm. Winds will pick up as the front races through the state today. Temps are all about location. The farther east you live, the warmer you will be with low 80s possible. Cooler temps in the 70s will be noted across the west. There is the potential for some areas to be several degrees cooler if clouds and showers are a little more dominant.
Readings by Saturday morning will be borderline chilly with upper 40s and low 50s. Skies will be partly sunny with afternoon highs in the low and middle 70s for many.
A system working our way from the southwest will throw some clouds our way Sunday and we may see a shower or two breaking out by days end. A better chance for showers and storms will roll in by Monday from this system. That’s when we start to look to the northwest and a powerhouse fall cold front. A line of showers and storms will be along and ahead of this front Tuesday as our winds really crank up. This is the first of two fronts to impact our weather next week. Here’s the European Model…
This is a pattern locking in for a few weeks and that means plenty of cold fronts diving across our region. Each of these will contain shots of chilly temps and this will up our chances for an early season frost threat.
If you’re a fan of fall… you are going to love the rest of this month.
Have a wonderful Friday and take care.
Good news for eastern Kentucky. The dual-pol upgrade for the radar at NWS Jackson KY is now scheduled to start October 24, about a month ahead of their original date.
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dualpol/index.php?wfo=jkl
NWS Charleston WV (which has jurisdiction over a few eastern KY counties) remains scheduled to begin September 24.
http://www.erh.noaa.gov/rlx/dualpol.html
Jackson’s new schedule may hint that the start date for NWS Louisville will also be moved up, to roughly Oct 16 (Louisville is scheduled after Indianapolis and before Jackson KY, all three by the same tech team; Indy’s start date has been moved up to Oct 9). The NWS Louisville Facebook page reports that staff there are already going through a dual-pol pre-install checklist.
It remains to be seen if the radar at NWS Paducah – along with radars at Ft Campbell and Evansville (both used by Paducah office) – will stick to the original January 2013 upgrade dates or not.
Two questions: Will the dual-pol upgrade mean that the imagery available on the NWS websites will also improve? And second, will this upgrade mean that KLVX will actually remain viewable and usable when storms are approaching? As it is now, you’ve got a 50/50 shot at being able to pull up radar imagery from the LMK homepage. It’s been down 6 times this month just that I’ve seen…and this pattern has been going on for years.
I’m merely an armchair weather nut, and don’t claim to know nearly all the issues. But I wonder if Louisville’s problems might mirror that of the NWS radar at Hytop AL (used by the Huntsville office). I’m now near Nashville, and the Huntsville/Hytop radar seems less reliable than Nashville.
Of course most NWS radars like Nashville, Paducah and Jackson KY are directly next to their offices. But the radar at Hytop is about 30 miles from the Huntsville office (roughly between Huntsville and Chattanooga). Likewise, as many of us know, Louisville’s radar is close to West Point KY near Ft Knox. The long distance between radar and office may leave ground lines more vulnerable during bad wx. Hytop AL was briefly knocked offline during a January 2011 snowstorm/thundersnow and, more alarmingly, during the April 27 2011 tornado outbreak. As a result, there were recommendations to better protect phone lines and increase redundancy between radar and office.
I have little idea if dual-pol will improve image clarity. FWIW, I think I read that while some dual-pol features are made available to the public once a radar become dual-pol, other features will only be internal until the very last radars are upgraded next summer.
Oh, go Toppers!!
What are the odds that Ky mesonet gets a station in Pulaski County?? It seems to be the donut hole in the state.
Chris, is today your birthday? If so, happy Birthday and may you have many, many snowy years to go 🙂
happy birthday chris