Updated 845am CDT Wednesday / 10 July 2013

…. A Dry Weather Pattern Continues ….

On this Wednesday morning…. surface high pressure is located over the southeastern USA and the western Atlantic Ocean. A line.. or trough.. of low pressure is over far west Texas and eastern New Mexico. Given this surface pressure pattern, surface winds are southerly across our area.

In the upper levels of the atmosphere… a large area of upper air high pressure.. acting like a lid on the atmosphere.. is over the southern plains and southern Rockies from Kansas and Oklahoma westward through northern New Mexico and southern Colorado into the southwestern USA. As a result of this upper air pattern, winds over south central Texas and the Austin metro area about 18,000 feet above the ground are southeasterly 10 to 20 mph.

Upper level high pressure area.. to our north.. has built southward over the area with a dry summer weather pattern expected over the next few days. Temperatures will continue to be at or above 100 degrees for the mid and latter part of the new week and first part of the weekend.

There are some indications of a slightly more unstable air mass by late Sunday into the first part of next week. I will trend afternoon high temperatures down a bit, but, given the latest atmospheric model guidance, I am not mentioning any rain chances at this point. I will, however, continue to monitor for this possibility.

The tropics.. the Atlantic Ocean, specifically.. are a little more active with tropical cyclone Chantal moving west northwestward in the Caribbean Sea south of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The official NWS forecast is for the system to move northwestward, as a weakened system, across eastern and central Cuba then into the southwest Atlantic northward off the east coast of Florida and then onshore along the Georgia coast over the weekend.

Have a good Tuesday night and Wednesday…
Meteorologist Troy Kimmel

Contact me:
tkimmel@austin.utexas.edu
http://www.facebook.com/troykimmel