Tropical system may help reignite Southwest monsoon next week
By
Brian Thompson, AccuWeather meteorologist
Updated Aug 24, 2021 8:04 PM EDT
It's going to be a fairly quiet final week of August across much of the West, with a relatively calm monsoon (especially compared to recent weeks) and limited rain chances all across the West.
With that in mind, we'll take a peek into the longer range and the potential for a tropical system to bring some moisture into the Southwest.
We're getting to the time of year where we need to watch Eastern Pacific for storms that can get pulled farther north. Since troughs are more likely to dip farther south heading into September and October, Eastern Pacific tropical systems will sometimes get pulled northward and bring bring rain to parts of the Southwest.
Even if the storm itself does not move into the Southwest, tropical moisture from these systems can stream northward in the upper levels of the atmosphere and help to juice up the monsoon a bit.
Let's take a closer look at the setup for this time around...
The models tend to agree that this system will end up near the southern tip of Baja California late in the weekend.
The big question is what happens to the storm after that.
As the storm moves to the northwest, it will either bend more to the west and remain out at sea or get tugged more to the north by a trough coming into the western U.S. around the middle of next week.
The GFS shows the potential setup late next Wednesday, the first day of September.
The feature west of Baja California is the storm. and that 582 line at the top of the map is the trough coming down from the northwest is the feature that could potentially draw the tropical system farther to the north.
That all being said, this is still a ways out and there are still many possibilities. The trough coming into the West could end up being faster, slower, farther south or farther north.
There's also the inherent trickiness with tropical systems, which can have a mind of their own at times if there aren't strong steering influences. In this case, a potential tropical system in the Atlantic, which is shown here potentially over Texas, adds another variable.
As we saw with Henri in the Atlantic this past week, setups like this are very fragile. Any small shift in any one of the variables can make a huge difference in the track of the storm.
We'll continue to watch the setup over the next week. Even if the storm does stay well to the south, some of its moisture may get drawn northward and enhance some of the monsoonal thunderstorms during the first half of next week.
Report a Typo
Weather Blogs / Western US weather
Tropical system may help reignite Southwest monsoon next week
By Brian Thompson, AccuWeather meteorologist
Updated Aug 24, 2021 8:04 PM EDT
It's going to be a fairly quiet final week of August across much of the West, with a relatively calm monsoon (especially compared to recent weeks) and limited rain chances all across the West.
With that in mind, we'll take a peek into the longer range and the potential for a tropical system to bring some moisture into the Southwest.
We're getting to the time of year where we need to watch Eastern Pacific for storms that can get pulled farther north. Since troughs are more likely to dip farther south heading into September and October, Eastern Pacific tropical systems will sometimes get pulled northward and bring bring rain to parts of the Southwest.
Even if the storm itself does not move into the Southwest, tropical moisture from these systems can stream northward in the upper levels of the atmosphere and help to juice up the monsoon a bit.
Let's take a closer look at the setup for this time around...
The models tend to agree that this system will end up near the southern tip of Baja California late in the weekend.
The big question is what happens to the storm after that.
As the storm moves to the northwest, it will either bend more to the west and remain out at sea or get tugged more to the north by a trough coming into the western U.S. around the middle of next week.
The GFS shows the potential setup late next Wednesday, the first day of September.
The feature west of Baja California is the storm. and that 582 line at the top of the map is the trough coming down from the northwest is the feature that could potentially draw the tropical system farther to the north.
That all being said, this is still a ways out and there are still many possibilities. The trough coming into the West could end up being faster, slower, farther south or farther north.
There's also the inherent trickiness with tropical systems, which can have a mind of their own at times if there aren't strong steering influences. In this case, a potential tropical system in the Atlantic, which is shown here potentially over Texas, adds another variable.
As we saw with Henri in the Atlantic this past week, setups like this are very fragile. Any small shift in any one of the variables can make a huge difference in the track of the storm.
We'll continue to watch the setup over the next week. Even if the storm does stay well to the south, some of its moisture may get drawn northward and enhance some of the monsoonal thunderstorms during the first half of next week.
Report a Typo