Scattered thunderstorms possible today, and more concerns later this week in Houston

Good morning. It’s pleasantly cool for this late April morning, with temperatures around 60 degrees for most of the Houston area. In contrast to our lovely, sunny Saturday however, clouds will return to the area today and that possibly could mean some rain.

Scattered, light rain is possible later this morning, with spotty heavier rain and thunderstorms potentially this afternoon. (We could also see nothing but gray skies.) Additionally, although the probability of this is low, I’m not ready to rule out some isolated, locally heavy rainfall. If that seems likely I will update later today.

After that Monday and Tuesday look fairly warm, low- to mid-80s, with partly sunny skies. Nothing to worry about then but the AC bills. However there are two things to look out for in the coming week.

TUESDAY NIGHT/WEDNESDAY

Forecasters have been warning for several days about ideal conditions for severe weather, including tornadoes, for northern Texas and Oklahoma during the day Tuesday. This still seems likely and will very likely be a major weather story this week.

This severe weather does not appear likely to affect Houston to any kind of a similar degree, but we could see some showers and thunderstorms late Tuesday and Wednesday. I don’t have much confidence in accumulations, but I would guess the range of rain totals for the area will run from 0 to 1.5 inches of rain.

END OF WEEK

For the last couple of runs the European forecast model, the best in the business, has been hinting at a broad upper-level storm system moving down into Texas and potentially affecting Houston. It’s going to depend upon the strength of the capping inversion, but the European model shows the cap breaking by Friday night or so, leading to potentially a lot of rain during the Saturday-Sunday period. This could mean anywhere from 1 to 5 inches, perhaps more, but I must stress this is far from certain. The model has been fairly consistent with such a scenario, however, and so we cannot dismiss it as a possibility.