Nice Thursday, Saturday monsoon, 1st heat wave in sight?

You can't please all of the people all of the time, but chances are you'll find some weather you like in the next two weeks in Minnesota.

As Rod Serling used to say in the classic Twilight Zone series; "Submitted for your approval."

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Thursday: Weather perfection

It just doesn't get much better than this in Minnesota. Some of the best weather on the planet will hover over Minnesota today. Look for a mix of sunshine and a few clouds today. Cloud cover will be greatest in southern Minnesota today, and may nudge the metro from time to time.

High temperatures will make the lower 70s in most areas this afternoon, with cooler 50s near Lake Superior on the North Shore. Winds will be light from the east.

Friday & Saturday: Next rainmaker moves in

Our next weathermaker has been sitting over the Rockies all week. The "Omega Block" high pressure cell that has delivered dry sunny weather to Minnesota is breaking down. Low pressure will swirl east from the Rockies into Minnesota this weekend.

The first waves of rain (& some thunder) should arrive Friday. A few rounds of showers and embedded T-Storms will move through Saturday. At this time various forecast model scenarios for Saturday range from a round or two of rain & thunder, to an all-day washout.

Forecast Models: Wet start to the weekend

Rainfall Friday & Saturday could easily fall into the .50" to 1"+ category for many locations in Minnesota. Due to the convective nature of the precip, there could be some downpours with localized heavier rainfall totals. Some 2"+ totals can't be ruled out this weekend.

Temps may hover around 70 for much of Saturday, with 60s under some of the heavier shower bands.

Sure would be nice to get a dry weekend for baseball tournaments for once, but it just doesn't appear to be in the cards for Saturday.

Sunday: Drier day of the weekend?

By Sunday the core of the heavy rain producing part of the storm will shift east of Minnesota. We may mix in several hours of sunny to partly cloudy skies, but a few pop up showers can't be ruled out Sunday.

It may feel a bit more like summer Sunday PM, with highs in the upper 70s.

"Wurzer Weather" Ahead: First summery heat wave in sight?

My MPR colleague and Morning Edition Host Cathy Wurzer loves hot, summery weather. Cathy just might be a happy camper in about two weeks.

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MPR's Cathy Wurzer

This may be going way out on the proverbial weather limb, but there may be a trend developing that could bring the first summer-like heat to Minnesota the first week of June. (Yes, can you believe June 1st is only 13 days away?!)

The latest GFS model trends indicate the possibility of a hot dome of high pressure developing in the east and shifting westward into the central USA in two weeks. This "Bermuda High" pattern is the mechanism which brings summertime heat to the eastern half of the good old USA.

GFS: "Bermuda type" high pressure pumps heat into the Midwest on June 2nd.

If the Bermuda High shifts west into the central U.S. a hot humid air mass will pump warm air and Gulf moisture north into the Upper Midwest.

It is early, but it's possible our first prolonged string of humid 80 degree plus weather is one the way the first week of June. If the pattern intensifies, we could even see our first 90s of the season in about two weeks.

We just turned off the heat. Is it already time to get the AC unit tuned up? Welcome to Minnesota.

Stay tuned.

Brightest 60 days ahead!

It's hard to fathom after what seemed like endless winter, but the longest daylight of the year is now upon us.

We hit 15 hours of daylight in the Twin Cities today. We will have at least 15 hours of daylight from now until July 24th. Check out this cool sunrise/sunset calendar to track our increasing daylight.

It's hard to believe but the summer solstice arrives in less than 5 weeks! What happened to spring in Minnesota?

April 2011: "Tornado Katrina"

Path of devestation in Alabama.

The Weather Channel's Stu Ostro has an interesting look at April's record tornado outbreaks. Did we just witness a "Tornado Katrina" last month?

"The ingredients were "textbook." I mean, literally what I learned from a textbook more than 30 years ago. The atmosphere was explosively unstable with summerlike heat and humidity, interacting with a classic wind shear setup as a strong jet stream and upper-level trough crashed overhead. Also, dry air aloft (dark red shades on the left image below) put a lid on things and allowed the energy to build up until it blew sky high.

Not only were the elements perfect for a tornado outbreak, they were present to an extreme degree. The observed EHI ("Energy Helicity Index"), a measure which represents a combination of instability and wind shear, was extraordinary, higher than during the time of two notorious [E]F5s, the Moore, Oklahoma and Greensburg, Kansas tornadoes on May 3, 1999 and May 4, 2007, respectively.

Such a set of combustible ingredients, plus a remarkable number of supercells with hook echoes on radar and "ground-truth" observations of tornadoes, led Dr. Forbes and me to decide to up TWC's "TOR:CON" index to a 10 for northern Alabama, meaning a 100% chance of a tornado within 50 miles, the first time that's been done since the product was developed a couple of years ago."

Many of us who studied meteorology have always used the April 1974 "Super Outbreak" as the baseline for tornado extremes. Last month blew those numbers out of the water, and reminded us all that weather records are meant to be broken.

NOAA Geodetic Survey: Go West young man!

What do you think of as the center of the United States? New York? Chicago? Maybe L.A.?

Nope. Try Plato, Missouri.

That's the newest "center of national population" according to NOAA's Geodetic survey from 2010 U.S. Census data.

Plato is in the Ozarks in south central Missouri about 100 miles southwest of St. Louis.

The USA population center shifted about 20 miles further southwest since 2000. It has moved 873 miles southwest since 1790 when the first center was calculated to be just west of Baltimore, MD.

The population center has shifted steadily west over the past 200 years as you might expect. It was in southern Ohio in the 1850s, southern Indiana in 1900, and southern Illinois in the 1950s through the 1970s. The population center has resided in Missouri since 1980.

"Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country." -- Horace Greeley

PH