The Farmer’s Forecast: Lower Humidity, Low Tropical Threat

By Nick Mikulas

Louisiana Farm Bureau News/Cenla Weather

Respectable humidity? In June? in Louisiana? Yeah, it looks that way! Lower humidity also means low, or no rain chances, depending on where you are. North of I-10 looks mostly dry through Saturday. After that, tropical moisture deepens across Louisiana, and rain chances will ramp up.

As of this writing, there is no specific tropical threat for Louisiana. Models are starting to sniff out some sort of tropical potential in the Gulf of Mexico by late in the weekend, or early next week. Upper level conditions aren’t perfect for development, so I don’t foresee anything terribly intense in the Gulf in the next 10 days, but given the background conditions, and very warm ocean waters, anything that tries to develop bears watching. As of now, I think anything that develops would be relatively weak.

This is the time of year where you will see lots of sites posting individual model runs that are 10-15 days out. As a meteorologist, I can say with confidence that we are not that good. Models are also not that good. They are incredible tools to help us forecast, but the variability from run to run, and from model to model is huge in the extended range. That is especially true once models are out past 10 days into the future. Find a trusted source for good information, and ignore the noise. I’ll have an update on the tropics later this week. As it stands now, I don’t see an imminent threat in the near future, but think we will at least see some decent rain return by Sunday or Monday.