As we start our Thursday in KC we once again are looking at rain around the area but not expanding through all the area. It’s been quite some time since we saw a widespread rain in the region and today won’t be that day either.

Radar this morning is showing rain in the far eastern part of the Metro on the MO side…and it’s possible that later today the rain is farther west of the Metro. A weird “splitting” that won’t leave a ton of people happy if they want the rain.

The latest drought report this morning came out and the news was a bit worse for many areas on the MO side especially. There is some hope though that over the weekend the rain chances will be increasing and perhaps this next shot will be a bit more widespread in coverage and more significant.

It may impact your weekend plans, however, especially Saturday into Sunday morning.

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One sentence update: Many miss out on the rain today in the metro but additional chances come this weekend and less hot weather.

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Forecast:

Today: Variable clouds with some scattered showers/storms east of most of the Metro this morning then a few showers/storms later today towards the west of the Metro. Not as hot with highs in the lower 80s

Tonight: Fair skies and a bit cooler with lows in the lower 60s

Tomorrow: Partly cloudy and a less humid for many areas. Warm too with highs in the mid 80s

Saturday and Sunday: Showers and storms are possible really at any time. Not as warm with highs in the upper 70s to lower 80s. It won’t be a rain out of a weekend but the chances may linger off and on for quite some time. One of those weekends to have radar on the app ready to go.

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Discussion:

Sort of a bummer watching radar. There is some rain out there and it’s definitely much needed rains for areas that are getting it.

Locally…

The weather map has our front…really just a dew point front and it might be near stationary this morning off towards the east of the Metro…

The numbers in green are the dew points. Notice how they’re much lower towards eastern MO compared to western MO. (40s to 60s). That’s drier air off towards the east of here.

The front will migrate westwards over the coming 24 hours and we should feel the change in the air mass tomorrow as dew points drop off to a more comfortable level.

The problem is we’re just NOT set up right now for widespread rains within the entire Metro area. The better chances this morning are towards the east of the region and while there may be some activity later today…it doesn’t look to focus in the Metro either at this point.

That brings us to the continuing drought that is affecting some areas harder than others. I’ve actually had some decent rains at my house in the last couple of weeks…close to 2 1/2″ worth. Other areas though haven’t.

The change from last week to this week is shown below. There wasn’t much change locally although on the KS side there was some improvement noted in the greenish color.

So that leaves us with this…you can see the extreme drought conditions out towards central MO from roughly Warrensburg towards the Lakes region to near Columbia.

and on the KS side…

There has been some nice improvement in western KS although extreme to exceptional drought conditions continue out there.

Over the last 30 days there have been significant deficits in the rain for this region.

and not surprisingly there is a connection to the warmer weather as well. Here is the 30 day departure from normal with regards to temperatures

Hopefully the weekend helps the rain cause. There is a set-up for rain but the timing is still questionable to some extent. The highest chance is later on Saturday into Sunday but there is a chance even in the morning of some activity around.

So it will be a tough weekend to plan outdoor events but I still don’t think it will be a washout of a weekend. Just sort of tough to plan for outdoor things. There should be more than a few dry hours during the daytime over the weekend I think.

In terms of the amounts…some areas may well see over 1-2″ of rain while other areas are again in the under 1/4″ range it appears. Who gets what though is the unknown at this point. The best upper level support may wait till Saturday night into Sunday early afternoon so that time frame perhaps offers the best chance of some decent moisture in the region

More on this tomorrow.

Meanwhile the smoke back east was the big weather story yesterday. I showed this animation quite a few times last night…it makes showing maps and charts of the smoke pretty useless when this simple time lapse says it all really.

Today while still awful, the worse may be more towards the southwest of the NYC area. Eastern PA as well as southern NJ and parts of the Mid Atlantic states are getting the worst of it. Also not the worse conditions in southern MI as well as northern OH.

Finally NOAA today declared an “official” El Nino has started. This has been expected.

You can see the transition from La Nina to El Nino in the boxed area, which is referred to as the 3.4 region.

There is an 84% chance of “moderate” El Nino conditions to be met heading towards the fall/winter and a decent chance that “strong” conditions are met in the same time frame. That link above does have some good information on it.

OK that’s it for today…the feature photo is from Chuck Carbajal down in Lees Summit. What do you see?

Joe