Quite a wild start to our monsoon season this year. Looking at area rain guages, most areas along the foothills and Front Range have received 2-5 inches of rain this past week, and I'm sure some areas have received even more. Certainly has put a damper on the fire danger which has been very nice, although there have been a lot of lightning strikes with our recent storms, but fortunately no lightning sparked fires that I have heard about.
Another round of afternon and evening storms likely again today, as atmosphere is unstable and lots of low level moisture in place. With all the recent rain, there is a positive feedback loop, where the recent rains add to the moisture available for the next days storms. Upper ridge currently located in eastern TX will migrate slowly northward into the central Plains this weekend, and then move slowly east to MO next week. This will keep the monsoon flow alive into next week, and likely beyond. The upper level pattern looks to persist through the end of July, which will keep our monsson pattern in place and keep a large part of the central US under extreme heat. This is a fairly normal climatological position for the upper ridge, so don't see any big changes in the overall US weather pattern in the near future.
What looks likely is that the monsoon spigot will lessen the flow a bit from Friday through Sunday, and temps will increase from 5-10 degrees over what they have been this week, so hot and slightly drier this weekend, although some storms are still likely to form and could produce heavy downpours. The more moist monsoon flow looks like it will make a return next week, so slightly cooler temps, more clouds and abundant thunderstorms for next week.
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"Climatology is what you expect, Weather is what you get".
"It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong".
Too bad future generations aren't here to see all the great things we are spending their $$ on!!
