April 23, 2018

Is it Summer Yet?

Current Conditions

Temperature: 67 °F
Dew Point: 28 °F
Winds: 0 mph
Pressure: 1020.0 mb
Visibility: 10 miles

Today was another beautiful yet uneventful day. This morning's sky consisted of some cirrostratus and cirrocumulus clouds that quickly faded by early morning (figure 1).

Figure 1. Sunrise on the UW-Eau Claire campus.

Temperatures rose from the upper 30s to the upper 60s by mid-afternoon. Winds were minimal, occasionally gusting up to 5 mph. Figure 2 shows the barometric pressure drop, which although small is hinting at the low pressure system moving in from the west.

Figure 2. Weather overview for Eau Claire, WI.

Figure 2 also shows the large dew point depression which means there's no rain in the forecast for tonight!
In the surface map in figure 3, one can see the low pressure system to the west that will be moving into the area tomorrow.

Figure 3. Surface map of the United States.

This low pressure system is causing relatively low precipitation compared to the low pressure system in the southeastern United States which is currently creating flooding conditions in the Carolinas. Otherwise, things seem fairly quite across the country and certainly much more subdued compared to last weekend when the blizzard hit! On a good note, Oklahoma is set to have the latest start to tornado season yet, so maybe there is some good coming out of this weird spring weather...

Previous Prediction

Yesterday's prediction was correct; the weather was warmer, even getting up to 70! If I didn't have so much homework I would have spent some of the day outside of the geography lab...

Prediction

Tomorrow will be overcast and about 10 degrees colder than today due to some cloud coverage from the low pressure system to the west. This shouldn't produce any precipitation however (figure 4).

Figure 4. Forecast surface map for April 24, 2018.