Welcome to fall...which came in this morning @ 4:05 CDT...but in reality the last day of summer and the first day of fall have been nearly a copycat of each other with highs around 70 degrees and plenty of sunshine.

This will be a remarkable stretch of weather, that aside from some cloud cover Sunday into Monday, will be marked, at least for the next 4 days, by cool crisp mornings and pleasant afternoons. After that there should be a brief warm-up Wednesday into Thursday, then another shot of cooler air for a couple of days...

What the modeling is very sure about is a lack of significant storms that will really affect our part of the country...indications continue this afternoon, about what I blogged about last weekend, that this dry stretch which now is only @ 5 days @ KCI will double, if not come close to tripling before our rain chances increase. In reality I really don't see anything that looks promising for a LONG time...our GFS model gives KC a whooping .01" of rain, connected with our late next week cool front...good luck with that.

What will probably happen is the dry air from the ground through 10K feet will be tough to overcome later next week. Surface moisture of significance will be even tougher to come by as dry west and SW surface winds will move into the area TUE-THU...effectively keeping any moisture source cut off. So the next front will not have any moisture to work with.

Fall can be a rather dry time around here anyway. Surface moisture is tough to come by and without it, instability is tougher to come by. That means rainfall, with the fronts is a bit tougher to come by as well. The new EURO is positively depressing for rainfall of significance through next weekend...so our dry September will turn into a dry 1st 5 days of October it appears...if not longer.

Speaking of dry spells...did some quick calculations here are the longest dry spells at some of the reporting stations in the area...KCI: 14 days...Downtown: 16 days...Pleasant Hill: 11 Days and Gardner: 11 days which they've done 3 separate times. Statistics like this are always arbitrary, since summer rainfall can be so spotty sometimes but it is what it is.

Over the weekend, I'll be watching an upper level low that will continue to deepen and "retrograde" or move from the east to the west. This should at least increase the cloud cover by the end of the weekend and continue to usher in cooler air aloft, and on the ground from the NE and east. This means highs for the weekend should be in the 65-70 range and lows in the 45-50 range.

That's about it...I'll try and come up with something to blog about over the weekend...but boy will it be tough, and I hate just regurgitating the same information again...so I'll be on the lookout for something interesting to talk about from a weather standpoint.

Joe