Farmer's Forecast - Weekend Storm Watch
By Nick Mikulas
It looks like a decent wave of rain will move through Louisiana Saturday evening into Sunday morning. This could bring isolated severe weather, with damaging wind being the main concern. I also think this will bring 1-2 inches of rain across most of the state. Even if you miss out on the stronger storms, I expect wind gusts in the 30-35 mph range Saturday evening into Sunday.
One other concern over areas that were impacted by the ice storm is that many limbs are weakened, or still just loosely hanging in trees. That means we won’t need as strong of a gust as typical to bring down some larger limbs. This can make warning storms a bit more difficult, as we get reports of large limbs down, but in some cases, they were brought down by wind that was well below severe limits. We saw this after the ice storm in 1997.
The drought monitor continues to slowly expand, and there is now a D3, extreme drought across parts of Concordia, Catahoula, LaSalle, Rapides, and Avoyelles Parish. That isn’t a great place to be as things start to heat up. The weakening La Niña will hopefully allow a return to more significant rainfall across the area in the coming months. I’ll be watching that closely!