Ticker for April 18, 2022

                
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April 18, 2022     April 18, 2022     April 18, 2022     April 18, 2022


Poor house




This is really no way to run a spring, but it is somewhat expected during a La
Nina year...especially a double-dip year. Rain in the east, dry in the west, lots
of fire danger, severe weather pushed east as well...all in the "tilted in that
direction" playbook for La Nina. We will have another large trough enter the
western U.S., and as it sits and spins (hey, I didn't tell it to do that!), it will
throw out little storm systems that give us a chance of rain from time to time
before the larger trough moves to the east with a bit more widespread rain chances
early in the weekend. Now normally when that trough sits to the west and kicks
out those storm systems, you'd see some severe weather and decent chance of rain.
As this year works out, however, we're still dealing with uncertainties and
conditional chances of "not enough moisture return from the Gulf in time" and
"the cap might not allow storms to form." So we'll see spotty chances here and
there before those better chances later on in the week.

In the meantime, as the trough approaches, we'll be back in the old playbook
we've seen for the last couple of months with temperatures soaring out west,
winds kicking up and fire danger scooting up into the elevated/critical
territory. Watch for western OK to flirt with 100 again Wednesday and Thursday.









No big severe weather outbreaks on the horizon. Sorry not sorry! But we do need
that rain. Sometimes in Oklahoma, you can't have one without the other, or
even the other without the one.

Speaking of really crappy weather (careful on that one), did ya know we had
another frost/freeze this morning up north?



I don't see any bigtime cold weather outbreaks again for the next week or so,
at least. There is the hints of one in some of the model forecasts about 10
days out, but at this point that's a fantasy-cast (or in our case, a
nightmare-cast).

Gary McManus
State Climatologist
Oklahoma Mesonet
Oklahoma Climatological Survey
gmcmanus@mesonet.org