Good Thursday, folks. Our awesome weather pattern continues across the Commonwealth of Kentucky and this looks to continue for a while. Once into next week, things can turn pretty darn cold for the middle of October.
Before we get to the local weather, let’s talk briefly on Hurricane Milton. This storm made landfall Wednesday evening near Sarasota, Florida as a Cat 3 storm. Not only did this cause destruction from a storm surge and high winds, but it spawned an incredible number of tornadoes.
Milton is weakening as it moves off the east coast of Florida early today and will continue to push away from the country. Here’s the latest from the National Hurricane Center…
Back here in Kentucky, today is another great day. Highs range from the mid 60s to mid 70s from east to west. That sets the stage for a clear and cold night with the chance for patchy frost in some of the coldest valleys of central and eastern Kentucky.
The clear sky tonight may also be accompanied by quite the treat as the Northern Lights show up. There’s the chance this rivals what we saw around here back in May and that was a really, really great show.
As a matter of fact, the Auroras may show up all the way into the deep south…
Temps this weekend then spike into the 70s on a strong southwest wind ahead of a powerful dip in the jet stream arriving late Sunday into early next week. There’s a chance for a closed upper level system to cutoff and spin in our region for most of next week…
That has a huge blast of colder than normal air coming in behind it. Highs in the 50s will be common with lows routinely in the 30s with the chance for below freezing temps for any night with clear skies…
There’s also the chance for some chilly showers to spin under that upper low….
These kinds of systems can also bring the first flakes of the season to the high ground of the Appalachian Mountains. The EURO is even showing some flakes downstream of Lake Michigan…
The EURO Ensembles sees the Appalachian Mountain flakes…
The GFS Ensembles also see that and a separate cold shot late in week two that tries to spawn some Ohio Valley flakes…
All this is telling me is that we have some healthy cold shots targeting the region over the next two weeks.
Enjoy the day and take care.
The October ENSO Forcast is out, and is forecasting a 60% chance that we will see a La Nina emerge during the September/November time frame. This is an 11% reduction over the previous month’s forevast. The La Nina is expected to persist through the January/March time frame.
The CPC is predicting a weak and short duration La Nina. What this means for our Winter forecast is any body’s guess, since it’s inevitable that our new normal will distort what we would expect in previous years.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.shtml