ORLANDO, Fla. – Some of us finally got to see some beautiful heavy rains during the second half of their day yesterday!
The backdoor front we’d been tracking off our east coast was finally pushed southwestward across our viewing area.
This small sliver of moisture and lift helped ignite even small pockets of intense thunderstorms! There were reports of gusty winds, damage, and some roadway ponding in your more organized cells.
According to our latest Fire Danger Index, some areas of the Florida Peninsula are no longer under high or even moderate danger of seeing brush fires ignite!
But now, dry air is back in place and high pressure is once again dominating our local pattern. Will we ever see this stubborn set up break down and disappear?
Things could get a little funky very soon according to long range computer models. But first things first, Climate Prediction Center has released their latest precipitation outlook and has us shaded for ABOVE average rainfall over the next couple of weeks.
That’s where things get tricky.
The GFS American model and the European model do indicate this large area of subtropical ridging will start to weaken. This will allow some areas of lower pressure to work their way into our local pattern.
But, it gets dicey from that point on.
Whenever low pressure systems find their way beneath ridging, it can cause a traffic jam in the flow of the atmosphere. As a result, you end up with what’s called a “blocking” pattern. As the name implies, it quite literally acts like a clogged drain and prevents things from moving in their usual nature.
This could be a positive though, in terms of our brushfire risks and the current extreme drought conditions that have been growing slowly but surely over the last few weeks. If a low pressure gets hung up beneath an area of ridging, it loses any type of influence to push it either west or east.
The only caveat to all this; models struggle BAD when anything acts to really cause mayhem to the natural flow of the weather over North America.
Always remember – the atmosphere is eager to be in a state of equilibrium. It doesn’t like anything uneven, and that’s precisely what drives our weather on a daily basis.
So when something really goes against the grain of how things behave, our computer models may start generating some very odd solutions because we’re so far from the norm.
But! Back to the positives!
With that being said, if any type of feature that helps to drive moisture into Central Florida ends up in the gridlock of atmospheric traffic this might help to provide us with more consistent rainfall.
For the time being it doesn’t look like a tremendous, drought busting amount, but it’s a positive trend in the right direction to hopefully get our environment back on track.