Dick Faurot's Weather Blog: Sunny With A Gradual Warming Trend

If you liked today, you will be very pleased with tomorrow and, for that matter, the next few days. Although temperatures will be gradually warming in the days ahead, no major changes are currently foreseen, even going into next week.

As you can see on the max/min temperature map for today, courtesy of the OK Mesonet, we had a very frosty start to our day, but the sunshine allowed for a nice rebound this afternoon, despite a brisk NW wind.

Those winds will be calming down tonight, and light winds will continue through the morning hours of Thursday before a light southerly breeze develops late in the day. Southerly winds will then prevail through Saturday, resulting in somewhat milder temperatures and lots of sunshine during the day. The clear skies and light winds tonight will result in another very frosty start for Thursday, but it will not be quite as cold Friday morning and that trend will continue into the weekend.

In fact, as you can see on our forecast page, temperatures will generally be above normal for much of this forecast cycle. By the way, normal at this time of year is around the freezing mark in the morning hours and low 50s during the day.

Another system will be moving across the state Sunday, shifting our winds back to northerly, and knocking temperatures down some, but, as mentioned earlier, no major changes are anticipated. In fact, that will likely just bring us back to near normal conditions Sunday afternoon followed by warmer than normal weather again going into next week.

The system will also have the potential to squeeze out some showers, but the QPF footprint looks to be rather meager, as you can see on the 7-day QPF forecast. Guidance continues to suggest the system will be moisture starved, so any showers that can form are expected to be on the light side.

Looking further down the road, the 8-14-day outlooks continue to suggest warmer than normal temperatures on average during that period, but it may become a little more unsettled with above normal changes of precipitation. Although the longer range guidance on occasion suggests some much colder air trying to penetrate our way in the days ahead, that does not appear to be very likely.

One of the reasons for that is a number of climate drivers that we monitor to get a feeling for what the longer term trends may be continue to suggest no major outbreaks of cold air coming this way. The very strong El Nino has been getting a lot of press lately and will certainly contribute to the seasonal warmer/wetter outlook that will likely dominate.

But, on shorter time scales, are some other feedbacks that are watched, such as the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Both of those are currently well into a positive phase, which typically suggests the coldest air will remain bottled up in the far north.

When those indices go negative, it’s typically an indicator of colder air moving southward.

So, although the trends suggest milder than normal conditions, that is not to say that some brief surges of colder air will not arrive from time to time such as occurred last week. Just that the pattern is currently not supportive of extended periods of cold air as we head deeper into December.

In the meantime, stay tuned and check back for updates.

Dick Faurot