If you caught my weathercast earlier this week, you may have heard me taking about the ‘burp’ or pocket of warm air that was going to be headed this way. Well today, that burp is on the move.
If everything shakes out like anticipated, the pocket of warm air will be responsible for record highs tomorrow in the Dakotas and Montana. Then record highs Sunday for places in Minnesota all the way back into Texas.
Then the pocket of warm air starts to modify as it gets pushed south by a cold front. By the time it gets here it won’t pack quite as much of the punch, so we won’t break any records (the record high for the official recording site at Bobby Chain Airport is 98 in 1919).
The coolest part about this is we can actually see the pocket of warm air on the Skew T chart from some of our models.
(right) Hattiesburg Skew-T for 10/12/15
Take a look at the picture. Recall this is a graph of air temperature and dewpoint temperature in the atmosphere. From down here on the ground, all the way up to above 50,000 feet. When the line is really steep from the bottom to the top, it means that the temperature isn’t changing as much, but when it’s closer to flat, it means there is a BIG change is temperature as you move up the atmosphere.
On the left is the chart from Oklahoma City on Sunday, the chart on the right is Hattiesburg on Monday, In the orange box, I’ve highlighted the pocket of warm air.Notice how it looks almost the same?
That was the NAM model data. Take a look at the GFS model data!
They are almost identical! How cool is that?!?
