It's been nearly impossible lately to come up with decent weather blogs that are interesting I think. We've talked about everything under the sun lately (of which we've seen a bunch of btw) with the one exception about talking rain chances. As you know we've been focused on the 7th-9th time frame for out next chance of rain. I've never been sold (and still am not) on us getting a bunch of rain out of this...but at least the chance would be something else to talk about.

Our dry spell will hit two weeks over the next couple of days. It last rained a couple of Sunday's ago, and as I've talked about this will be the longest dry stretch of the entire year...and it still shows no signs of ending over the next 5-7(+?) days as our next storm is going to undergo a lot of changes and is going to weaken and shear out tremendously before it reaches us it appears. It's still a long ways out, and hopefully it will change but it's been getting less and less impressive on the model runs lately. Perhaps the EURO has been on to something all along. It never really brought much rain here till the end of NEXT weekend, if not a week from Monday, keeping most of the rain off towards the west of the area...and since the rain would be moving from the SSW to the NNE, if not due north...it was never very bullish in the rain reaching us...

The energy for this change in our weather is still near Asia.

This energy will move through the northern Pacific and eventually carve out a new and potent storm in the Gulf Of Alaska. Anytime we're talking about features so far away the models will have issues with them since the energy is in a more data sparse region of the world. Also the models will have difficulties in handling the energy that they do capture and as a result really can't be trusted to accurately portray the events that may unfold.

Regardless of that they do suggest hints (strongly) that something is going to happen...and while the biggest effects will be for the western 1/3 of the country with rain and perhaps the 1st decent mountain snowfall of the season in parts of CA and NV the energy at some point will cross the Rockies and change things up here.

The good news is that for a period of several days we'll have a persistent flow of air coming from the Gulf Of Mexico...the longer the storm and attending cold front take to get here the longer this flow will be established and the juicier our air will eventually get...but it's going to be a slow process. Here is the GFS forecast for dewpoints late in the week...we're still struggling with the dry air in place...dews are only 50-55 or so...

Now look at the forecast for later in the weekend...

The better gulf moisture finally gets here sometime on Saturday.

Aloft, at around 18K feet the energy from the western storm actually splits with the best/bulk of the energy moving well NW of KC, but according to the model, a piece or two breaks off and starts moving our way.

This, again is all very suspect.

Finally after more than 6 months of flood warnings along the MO River, most now have been dropped. The Warning that was in effect for the St Joe area for the past 201 DAYS(!) has been dropped finally. There is still a warning for the Rulo area up towards Atchison County, MO.

Finally Ophelia is now towards the SE of the Island of Bermuda...some of the outer bands are effecting the Island...here is the radar imagery...from about 1PM CDT...

You can clearly see the eye of the storm about 170 miles from the Island...it's a major hurricane with winds of 120 MPH and will pass off towards the east of the Island.

Joe