00:00On the forecast feed, we're going to be talking about two unrelated thoughts that actually
00:05are connected to one another.
00:06We have heat in the Great Plains, it's going to be a big story, and also the return of
00:11some strong thunderstorms eventually, after a nice prolonged dry, quieter spell in the
00:16Northeast, we get back into it next week.
00:19They are related though, and I'll show you how.
00:21Before we get into that though, first a quick look at three big headlines for the weekend,
00:26so I'll get my head out of the way.
00:28We're looking at stormy weather in the Southeast, frequent downpours, lightning, and some localized
00:33flash flooding will be a concern in the Southeastern US.
00:36Another big headline this weekend, sizzling heat in the Plains.
00:40Some areas will be approaching record highs, we'll give you a few examples Thursday, Friday,
00:44and then we'll jump ahead to Sunday.
00:46There's still a wildfire threat in the Northwest that will actually be escalating as well, so
00:50the weekend is going to be actually very pleasant in the Northeast.
00:54But first off, let's talk about some of these near record highs in the Plains, and then I'll
01:00get into the computer models.
01:01I'm also sneaking a little bit of Florida in here, maybe perhaps a little awkwardly,
01:05but the record heat, or near record heat is occurring initially in Texas and parts of
01:10Florida Thursday.
01:11You can see Borgia, Texas 106, 104 in Amarillo, and then also Tampa may make a run at a record
01:18high.
01:19Before we get too far into this, I want to show you why this is happening.
01:23And overall, you can see a couple of different competing factors.
01:27We're going to go up about 20,000 feet up into the atmosphere, 500 millibars, and we have
01:32a strong upper level ridge of high pressure.
01:34By the way, this sneaky guy here just to the south is actually, again, the center of circulation
01:42could form a little farther south, but a loft is actually farther south.
01:45This is, that's Bertha moving west into Thursday morning.
01:50But overall, there's a big ridge of high pressure that is keeping areas unaffected by Bertha really
01:56hot here over parts of the southern plains.
01:59And as we give you another example of what some of this looks like here, again, here is
02:06another model.
02:07This is the NAM that also takes the upper level low pressure system associated with Bertha
02:11south, and then also the European generally south.
02:15So we've got to keep an eye on the future of this storm.
02:16But regardless, there's going to be a lot of heat that builds.
02:19And watch, after that storm fades, this big ridge of high pressure aloft, I'm going to
02:26circle it in a different color so you can see it a little more clearly.
02:30It's going to be pretty expansive.
02:31This is the 594 decameter line.
02:35So basically, talking about like a mountain of air, very, very high bubble of air in the
02:41atmosphere.
02:42And remember, hot air expands, colder air constricts, and this is like a mountain of
02:47air that expands.
02:47In fact, if we were to compare the footprint of the 594 line, if you think about almost
02:52like a topographical map, it's a little smaller this Wednesday evening.
02:56Fast forward, look how big it gets.
02:58This is a big swollen mountain of air, basically, over the south central U.S. into Friday night
03:03and Saturday.
03:04And then fast forward into Sunday, it holds strong, although by early next week it begins
03:09to get kind of tampered down from the north.
03:11Here's the European, and it has a fairly sizable ridge.
03:14I could just plot this high right over the center of it.
03:17So this is responsible for a lot of the heat in the short term.
03:20And as we go back to our graphics, I showed you some of the record-challenging highs for
03:25Thursday.
03:25Here's Friday, 106 in Roswell, New Mexico.
03:28That would tie a daily record, 103 in Amarillo, Texas would tie the record from just three years
03:32ago.
03:33And we're still pretty steamy in some other areas.
03:35And then let's fast forward to Sunday, I showed you that that big mountain of air is
03:38still present.
03:40106 all the way north into Rapid City, South Dakota.
03:42You might say, South Dakota is typically cool.
03:44They're landlocked, and they can have some tremendous extremes.
03:47So the daily record high for Sunday, for Sunday's date, which I'm trying to think what day it
03:53would be, 22nd, 3rd, 4th, 26th of July, the record high is 104 from 2021.
04:00They can see some tremendous heat there, but 106 would break the daily record.
04:03Amarillo, Billings, Montana, 102, the record 101 for the same date.
04:07Casper, Wyoming, 100 degrees.
04:09So tremendous heat.
04:10Denver, you're going to make a run at NERA record as well.
04:13And you can see, big picture, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we have a big ridge of high pressure.
04:19Remember that mountain of air was kind of generally in that area as I'm kind of redrawing it on
04:24our forecast map.
04:25But you'll notice there's also this jet stream that eventually is going to begin to send
04:31some disturbances from Canada around the perimeter.
04:35And there's even a zone with some thunderstorms on the northeastern perimeter of the ridge
04:39of high pressure in the south central U.S.
04:41But overall, the storm track is going to get more active here.
04:44And we're going to begin to see some disturbances.
04:47Here you can see, while there is a large zone of low pressure to the north over the Hudson Bay,
04:56we still have this contrast with high pressure to the south.
05:00And as we move into next week, we're going to begin to see that disturbance to the north
05:05send some energy across the Great Lakes, these little ripples of energy.
05:09I know these bright colors, they look a little chaotic.
05:11This is a measure of vorticity or spin in the atmosphere.
05:15And these disturbances are going to lead to pockets of lift in the atmosphere.
05:20If you're east of one of them, you're in a posture of lift in the atmosphere.
05:23Here's another one, be some extra lift in the atmosphere east of there.
05:26So that's going to produce more showers and thunderstorms.
05:28Here's kind of a less grainy looking version.
05:31The European model has kind of lower resolution.
05:33So it shows more definitively this disturbance coming in right across the area with recent wildfires.
05:39You're going to see another round of storms there.
05:40And east of there, as that area of lift is approaching you,
05:43you can look out for thunderstorms in the Great Lakes Sunday night and Monday.
05:46And then Monday evening, look at this, we have a pretty sharp trough.
05:50And east of there, this is the area where we could expect to see
05:53some thunderstorms.
05:54So the actual modeling here is the GFS.
05:58The timing is a little different between the two models.
06:01Storms Sunday night into early Monday morning in the Great Lakes
06:05and then into the northeast Monday evening in the Ohio Valley.
06:08That's the GFS.
06:10The European, it shows a little bit more of a delayed start Sunday night in the Great Lakes.
06:15Monday, it's more of Michigan Monday night into the Great Lakes region
06:18and it'd be more of a Tuesday impact for the northeast.
06:21So there's still a little bit of question as to the details.
06:24But what we want you to know is sometime between Monday and Tuesday,
06:27the northeast will get back into some strong thunderstorms.
06:29But in the meantime, you can see we're running cool.
06:32This is a statistical look at how temperatures compare to normal.
06:35Cooler than normal in the Ohio Valley for a bit.
06:37But watch the heat build up into the northern part of the plains
06:41into the weekend with some record highs coming.
06:43Pretty significant heat coming your way into the Dakotas and Montana later this weekend.
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