Ticker for October 25, 2023

                
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October 25, 2023   October 25, 2023   October 25, 2023   October 25, 2023


For raining out loud!




As Brian Bosworth said about beating Nebraska in 1986 to win a trip to the Orange
Bowl: "It's awful sweet!" Very generous rainfall totals adding up over the
remnants of Hurricane Norma hitting yesterday and the current storm #2's passage.
Heck, it's raining right now for crying out loud!



Of course, he spent that Orange Bowl on the sidelines with a "National
Communists Against Athletes-NCAA" jersey on that eventually got him kicked
off the team, and that's how NW OK and the Panhandle feel as they've been left
out of the bounty.





Storm #3 still tracking for this weekend, and if you add up #2 and #3, you get
#5!

MATH!

But you also get a lot more rainfall, especially across south central up into
east central OK. Here is #2's (careful!) forecast rainfall:



And here's what you get when you add in #3:



This still-somewhat tropical airmass is providing ample fuel for heavy rainfall,
as western OK is finding out right now. Precipitable water values (i.e., the
amount of water in the air available to be turned into precipitation through
the various physical processes used to produce, uhhhhhhh, precipitation) over
the last couple of days have been extremely extreme given the time of year.
Down near the surface, at least outside of the areas with rainfall which comes
with some evaporation and cooling, we've seen record high morning temperature
mins.





I would imagine to the east we'll see those lows drop below record high levels
as the rain moves in, but again just another way to show how moist it is. Those
high dewpoints act as sort of a barrier to temperatures falling below that
point (dewpoint to be exact) due to the release of heat with condensation if
the temperature reached that dewpoint temperature.



I'm sure I could have said that better but my mind is on WINTER! We're gonna
get a cold front on Friday with storm system #3, but sometime Saturday night
or Sunday, we're gonna get a COLD front, with the first arctic air of the
season. And I'm talking bone-chilling cold if you're out in it, with wind
chills down into the 20s (maybe some teens here and there, and as a father of
3, I can honestly say there's nothing worse than teens), a widespread hard
freeze, and maybe some ice up in NW OK.





I joked about it for months, but frozen Halloween anyone? At least it warms
up to the 40s that afternoon, but your trick or treaters are gonna be eating
frozen caramel apples as temps fall back into the 30s that evening.

Dentists are gonna have a field day after Tuesday.





A rock? I got an ice cube!

Watch out for flash flooding later today!



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