Good morning. Summer has clearly arrived in Houston when the morning low is about 80 degrees, and relative humidity is above 90 percent. Another feature of summer is possible tropical activity, and you may hear some talk of a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico later this week, or during the weekend. But it’s not something I’d be too concerned about as a resident of Texas.
TODAY-SATURDAY
Summer-like conditions continue, with about four more days of highs in the mid-90s, mostly sunny skies, and rain chances near zero. Don’t really need to say more when we’re under this kind of influence from high pressure. Beware of afternoon heat indices near 105 degrees.
SUNDAY-TUESDAY
By Saturday or so the high pressure over Texas should move back west, anchored more over Colorado and the southwestern United States.
The positioning of this strong ridge should allow a more northeasterly flow later this weekend for Texas, bringing temperatures down in the Houston metro region to around 90 degrees, with morning lows probably backing off a few degrees, too, into the low 70s. A few disturbances could bring some scattered rain chances back to the area as well, but at most we’re probably talking about a few tenths of an inch of rain. And much of the area will be lucky to get that, I’d guess.
TROPICAL STORM?
The National Hurricane Center has begun tracking the possibility of a tropical system developing in the Bay of Campeche by Sunday or Monday, and it assigns a 20 percent probability to this actually happening. I think it’s certainly plausible we might see some tropical development down south (a weak tropical storm), but the high pressure ridge anchored over the southwestern United States this weekend will very likely steer anything that develops into Mexico. We’ll keep an eye on it, of course.
Posted by Eric Berger at 7:45am CT on Wednesday