Weekend Storms?

It's been an active week and a half for much of the Northern Plains, and the same song and dance continues this evening with several severe weather watches in effect. Fortunately, the tornado outbreaks have been limited by a fairly weak zonal flow aloft. Unfortunately, large hail storms have been the rule, and I'm sure the insurance companies are staying quite busy.

Turning my attention closer to home, models are in good agreement on digging an abnormally strong trough into the Southeast U.S. this weekend. After reading area forecast discussions around the area, I'm a bit surprised that the severe weather threat is not being hit harder. There should be plenty of instability in advance of the cold front. Combine that with unseasonably strong wind fields, and this set-up should support a much higher than normal chance of severe weather in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. It will be interesting to see if this gets more hype tomorrow. Regardless, the cold front should push well into the Deep South by Monday and will cool temperatures off significantly for most areas -- at least for a couple of days.

Very quiet weather continues to dominate the tropics, but I get the feeling that won't last much longer. Any storms that do form later in the year will probably intense with the undisturbed ocean waters. However, it will be interesting to see if a weak El Nino develops this season, which may help to limit the number of named storms. The 90 day SOI is fairly neutral and doesn't point to any strong signals of a La Nina or El Nino event.