From Sledding to Sweating: This week's big warm up!

I hope everyone had a chance to get out and enjoy Wednesday night's snow storm and Thursday's snow day that MSU students will NOT have to make up! We picked up approximately 5.5" of snow here in Starkville. Enjoy these pictures I took on campus Wednesday evening as the system was winding down:

But now, get ready to break out the shorts. I feel a bout of spring fever coming on!

The weather pattern we've been used to pretty much since early December is about to change remarkably. Where we have been getting different storm systems every few days or so, we will now see long periods of quiet weather conditions- and it is going to be warm. In fact, tonight may be the last freeze we see for quite a while!

A 1032mb High Pressure center is located right on the SE coast of Texas. This will be 1/2 of our weather maker for the next week or so. As it migrates east into the northern Gulf of Mexico and weakens, we will see southwesterly flow and then southerly flow, help bringing us some much warmer temperatures. I'm talking 10-15 degrees above average.

And you will also need to break out those sunglasses, as we will see a very sunny next few days. That is because we have dry air in place aloft and in conjunction with the High Pressure Center will not allow for cloud development. I thought it was pretty interesting to do a side-by-side comparison with a Water Vapor Image and a Sounding "Skew-T":

On the right, the oranges and blacks indicate the very dry air that is in place at about 700mb. Now compare it to the image above, which shows temperature (the red line) and dewpoint (the green line). Notice the dewpoint, a standard indicator of atmospheric moisture, disappears off the image starting at 700mb and doesn't show back up until nearly the tropopause! So dry air in place aloft will allow us to enjoy predominantly clear skies for the next couple of days!




Hope you guys have a great rest of the weekend and enjoy this gift from Mother Nature!

Jake R