ST. LOUIS — 11:18 P.M. Sunday: I'm going to attempt to write this a little differently than some of the other articles you may see on here that I've written in the past. It may give you a little bit of an insight into how the forecast can really change over the course of a week to ten days. I'll try to update it every day in some fashion, so you can get an inside look at how this storm may affect us later in the week.
Right now, there's not much going on. We have seen beneficial rain that we haven't had in more than 50 days in this area. There will be more on Monday as this fills in along the front.
We may really start with some heavy rain in a few areas Monday morning. Pockets of heavy rain will be around through the morning and even most of the day. Expect a rainy and cooler Monday, with another soaking rain. This will not be a deep dive into Monday's rain, but we will use this storm as a guide on what may happen the rest of the week.
But the driving force behind all of this mess is an upper low that will continue to push cooler air in behind for us the next day or two. This is not very unusual in itself, what follows is rather unique.
A tropical system has been slowly churning near the Gulf of Mexico for the last few days. "Invest 97-L," as it is dubbed right now, will eventually have a name over the next few days as it meets favorable conditions. Once again, that is no surprise either. It's September. This is peak hurricane season.
But what is the most intriguing and interesting aspect to me is how they will both interact with each other. That upper low moves south and basically stalls out, aiding the tropical system moving ashore. What happens next? That still remains in question. I am not sure that modeling really may solve this until a day or two away, that's why this forecast is SO fluid and will be interesting to follow for the next few days. There's no doubt it will be cooler and cloudier, but will that be it? Or will we get a steady diet of tropical moisture, and then rain to follow?
The only thing that I am really certain about is that it will be cooler than average by the end of the week. That won't take too much, but our average high around then is about 78 degrees. The track, timing, and totals....they're all up for grabs! The main thing in my mind: this storm hasn't even formed yet. Recall a recency bias story of Francine. It seemed a certainty we would get SOMETHING...then we got 0.08" of rain (or less!) This system has a long way to go. Remember, I want to keep you posted and I think this is the best way to do it as I have updates on this just about every day, sometimes more than once. It will be interesting to see how long this holds up. The even more interesting thing? If this plays out like the above model solutions? There could be even cooler air that pushes down after that. We could go from hot and dry to cool and wet for about 2 weeks straight.