It’s a wonderful week of weather coming toward the region this week as we finish September on a warm note, and we start October with likely well above average highs.

Warm days with pleasant mornings all thanks to dry air that has moved into the region over the past 24 hours or so.

The overall pattern looks to be dry with a small chance of some rain out there on Wednesday, but aside from that we may be waiting till later into the first week of October for more moisture, so hopefully you got some good rain over the past weekend.

So about that rain…

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One sentence forecast: Pleasantly warm this week with most days 5-10° above average.

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Forecast

Today: Sunny and warm with highs in the lower-to-mid 80s

Tonight: Clear and pleasant with lows in the mid-to-upper 50s

Tomorrow: About the same although we should have more clouds. Highs in the lower 80s

Wednesday: Mostly sunny and warm with highs in the low-to-mid 80s

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Discussion

Not much weather of note this week, although there may be some showers/storms around tomorrow night or Wednesday morning… scattered.

So let’s take a look back on Saturday. As you know I strive to be transparent with you on the air and in the blog regarding my forecast accuracy. This past Saturday was a frustrating day because for days we were expecting severe storms and rain, with great weather on Sunday for the game.

The main issue wasn’t what happened with the main forecast, we had severe weather, hail being the main thing. We had rain, and we had perfect weather on Sunday… it was the timing.

My old friend Don Harman used to say, “Every forecast is perfect… it’s the timing that’s off,” and that was never more true.

The data and the set-up favored PM storms, with severe weather potential. There was a chance of some fast-hitting storms in the morning and I mentioned that on the air.

Where the forecast went off the rails though was that the morning into early afternoon activity was the main show and NOT the late day stuff in the Metro.

The late day forecast of storms was accurate except it happened about 30-50 miles south and south east of the Metro and not in KC. This occurred because the morning activity was way more robust that I thought it would be.

That was the main issue to the forecast failure to some extent, that morning activity. When a few storms popped up around 7AM or so towards the southwest of KC, I wasn’t that concerned that things were going off the rails.

I sort of expected a couple to occur. It’s not that uncommon as hotter air is about to enter the picture replacing the pleasant air behind the storms on Friday.

However, what evolved wasn’t a quick-hitting storm or two; it was multiple storms, many with at least some hail… some of which got to golf-ball sized. They ended up targeting the entire Metro region and they didn’t just come in and go out. There seemed to be persistent redevelopment as the morning evolved into the early afternoon.

My colleagues at the NWS were issuing dozens of severe thunderstorm warnings through the morning… every storm seemed capable of producing at least quarter sized hail, and thensome.

That was not expected at that time of the day and that was the main forecast failure.

This has cascading effects through the afternoon in the METRO. Instead of heating up into the mid-to-upper 80s. We saw highs only in the upper 70s with mostly cloudy conditions reducing the instability for later in the day when the bigger storms were due to form.

So that created the other forecast fail: The temperature forecast.

Highs did pop into the 80s on the south side of the Metro and close to 90 the farther southwest of the Metro you went, but for KC we got worked over so much from the morning convection that the atmosphere was thrown into a stable but chaotic mess, as usually happens with this events.

The concern for the later afternoon and evening was that IF we could get more unstable later in the day, perhaps we could fire off some additional storms. I held on to that potential a bit too long in retrospect. As I went out around 5PM towards Lenexa, I noticed around 6PM cells trying to pop up on the west side of JOCO.

That was going to be my expected strong line of storms.

As those clouds tried to grow more vertically however, they just didn’t have enough instability to work with and sort of just faded away. There went the stronger late day and evening storm threat, a victim of the morning storms that rearranged the atmosphere, and hence the main forecast fail of the day.

In the blog on Friday I talked about the forecast fail part that could happen… IF I had higher confidence that we were going to get those morning storms to the degree we got them, odds are I would’ve been all over that because around here usually IF we get lots of AM stuff the PM stuff fails to materialize or is much less of a thing.

Frustrating… we got the severe weather, we got the needed rain and we got the perfect day on Sunday correct. The timing was just woefully wrong on most of the things we got right, and that affected many events that were hoping that they’d be in good shape till after 3PM or so… when the thought was that all bets would be off.

It turned in to a great night for the Metro.

I thought you would like to have an explanation about what went wrong. Also I do wonder about that system on Friday if there were lingering effects to the atmosphere into Saturday morning providing a set-up to increase the lift as the muggier air/moisture came into the region from the south.

The feature photo is from last night…as the northern lights made an appearance in the region with long form photography. This is from Kaden up towards Maysville.

Joe