It is still windy out there this morning, but the winds will tend to die down throughout the afternoon as an area of high pressure builds in from the West.  We are in-between storms today and tonight.  Changes will come on Thursday.

Take a look at the upper level flow.  There is cut-off low over the Southwestern US this morning:

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A stronger wave will dive down from Canada and the northern and southern streams of the jet will phase together.  Here’s the 500 mb forecast for Thursday evening:

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The storm will head our way, increasing the chance of rain late Thursday… Thursday night… and throughout the day on Friday.  This powerful storm has the potential to be very wet, as it also taps into some Gulf moisture… so heavy rain is possible!  Here is the rainfall forecast from both the GFS and the NAM as of early this morning:

Click to enlarge GFS

Click to enlarge NAM

You can see there is a narrow band of very heavy rain (over 2-3 inches), and then it greatly tapers off to lower amounts on either side.  Just a shift 50 miles or so will have a huge impact on who sees that heavy rain.  Imagine how stressed out we would be if this were a snow storm!  But it’s not… we’re still talking about rain… and we’ll continue to watch each model run very carefully to pinpoint who will see the most rainfall.  Right now, it looks like it will be some of our northern counties.

Jamie