Well tomorrow looks interesting in several ways regarding both high temps and possible severe weather tomorrow evening and into the overnight hours. Question is, do we awake to full sunshine or to being socked in clouds like we were today which kept temps down until the late afternoon hours. Currently there is some scattered unorganized convection on top of the ridge firing on the nose of the LLJ out in the northern plains with a few showers around here. Right now I'm favoring a sunny start to the day and temps should climb pretty rapidly into the mid 90's and possibly even warmer if we stay sunny into the afternoon nearing 100 degrees. Sitting under the 850mb thermal axis it's not going to take long to really heat up if we have sunshine with deep mixing.
This surface heating is going to lead to a lot of instability in the atmosphere and juice for possible storms to tap later on. Some forecast models have a piece of energy or shortwave cresting the top of the ridge, associated with stronger mid level flow (35-50kts) moving into are area by late afternoon/evening. *IF* storms were to form thanks in part to this wave, they would have the potential to be severe with damaging winds the primary threat. Looking at one model, perfect prog of the 0z NAM blows up a ESE moving MCS around DBQ and pushes it across southern WI/northern IL after 7pm. If that were to happen the mean wind and instability gradient would favor this area. But, some models have these storms further north so we'll see.
A lot can go wrong with this forecast...we could wake up to clouds and only make it to 90 degrees and that would screw up storm chances later on in the day.
I'll go with a high of 97 at ORD
Sunday, July 22, 2012
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