Eric Berger

Good morning. It’s in the 40s across Houston this morning, and we’re now going to remain in a cooler pattern through the weekend, with a light freeze possible on both Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Today

Northerly winds will keep conditions across the area winter-like today, with highs likely rising only into the mid-50s under partly sunny skies. Look for another cool night tonight in the mid-40s.

Thursday and Friday

Winds should veer back out of the south on Thursday during the daytime hours, and with some moisture in the air we can’t rule out a few scattered showers along with highs in the low 60s. Accumulations will be slight, however. A cool front will move into Houston later on Thursday to reinforce the colder air mass already in place.

The big question is rainfall later on Thursday night, Friday, and Friday night. An atmospheric disturbance will move into the area Friday morning, but there’s not going to be an overly amount of moisture to work with. At a minimum Friday looks to be cloudy and cold with highs in the mid-40s, and with northerly winds it will feel colder. Any light rain on top of this will make for a pretty grim winter day. If this precipitation persists into Friday night across northern Houston and counties such as Montgomery and Walker, some sleet is possible. We’ll continue to track that possibility.

(Space City Weather is sponsored by Westbury Christian School for this month)

See full post

I lacked the heart to post an update this morning about weather conditions for the 2017 Houston Marathon because, well, the forecast was really rather grim. Grim as in warm—or perhaps even really warm with race time conditions in the 60s, rising into the 70s. I’d hoped that maybe, just maybe, the 12z models that came out this afternoon would offer some hope for a cooler race day.

I’m happy to report that the outlook is a tiny bit better.

As ever there is extreme caution required when considering long-range forecasts, especially at 12 days out. However temperatures in winter are a little bit easier to forecast than, say, a hurricane. That’s because a hurricane is a relatively small meteorological phenomenon, which can be perturbed by relatively small changes. Temperatures are largely controlled by very large upper-air patterns, which are a little bit more predictable. And in this case the global models are showing a rather large area of high pressure building over the United States next week, for much of the central and eastern United States. This will bring temperatures up.

If you click the graphic below (which shows the GFS model forecast for daily temperature anomalies for the next 16 days) to enlarge it, it should make a little more sense.

(Space City Weather is sponsored by Westbury Christian School for this month)

See full post

For most of us running the upcoming Houston marathon on January 15th we had our last, semi-long run this past weekend, and it’s time to taper down to the main event. We’ve trained. We’ve worked hard. And now we’re at the mercy of Mother Nature. So let’s discuss what’s in store.

When it comes to forecasting weather conditions nearly two weeks out it’s important to remember that forecast models have limited accuracy after about 10 days. Perhaps the best way to gauge conditions from this far out is to look at the ensemble runs of global forecast models. That is, the GFS and European models are each run about 50 different times with slightly different starting conditions. This gives a range of outcomes, and from looking at all of these ensemble runs we can get some probabilities on conditions.

(Space City Weather is sponsored by Westbury Christian School for this month)

See full post