After the seasonably cold start this morning, temps this afternoon will rebound back into the lower to middle 40s with northwest winds at 8-12 mph. Another weak and dry cold front will move through the region overnight tonight, doing nothing more than flipping the winds back to the northwest. Lows area-wide will be in the 20s.
A warming trend begins on Sunday, with lots of sunshine, highs will make it into the middle 40s. We’ll be 10-15 degrees warmer on Monday, as highs approach the 60-degree mark, with the best chances of exceeding that will be south of US 50 highway.
Tuesday will be a critical fire danger day, with strong south winds likely as our next storm system approaches. Highs will make it into the mid 60s, with readings near 70 possible in the far southern counties. The breeze will stay with us Tuesday night as clouds increase and temps fall into the mid 40s.
During the day Wednesday, a cold front will make steady progress through the state. Highs, especially in southern Kansas, could be achieved in the morning with steady to falling temps in the afternoon. We could see a few light rain showers Wednesday afternoon, especially southeast of the Kansas Turnpike.
The focus of this forecast continues to be the upcoming storm for the Wednesday to Friday timeframe. Both of our trusted long-range models are in good agreement with bringing the system into the Oregon coast Monday afternoon and continuing it through California into Wednesday. Past that point, differences arise in how the models handle a piece of energy on the backside of the main storm system. The GFS is more of a positively-tilted scenario, while the Euro is more neutral to a slight negative-tilt. The end result is that the GFS doesn’t wait for the energy to phase together and produces a more wintry scenario farther north (north of US 50 highway) and east, while the Euro model is slightly slower, more phased, and produces a wintry scenario across a larger part of Kansas. These are just some of the differences to be ironed out in the coming days. The bottom line continues to be that we are expecting beneficial precipitation for the eastern two-thirds of Kansas in the mid-late week period. Stay tuned for additional updates.
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