June preview weekend, rain wanted

Spring has sprung in Minnesota this year. This is certainly the best spring in three years in Minnesota for those who love sunshine and mild weather. The spring in your step grows as the calendar turns to May Friday. The weather maps whisper June this weekend.

This year our postcard perfect spring weather has come with a stealthy price tag. I've busted my share of forecasts over the years. I wish this post from January about my concerns for developing drought this spring was one of them.

So far I don’t see a pattern change that brings heavy snows to Minnesota anytime soon. If that doesn’t change, drought may become the theme as we head for spring of 2015 in the Midwest. -Updraft post January 28, 2015

As I wrote Thursday morning, drought deepened in Minnesota this week according to the updated U.S. Drought Monitor. The driest areas of Minnesota? From Thief River Falls to Bemidji, Brainerd to Detroit Lakes. Most of northwest and north-central Minnesota is now in the severe drought (D2) category.

Spotty passing showers Friday

When in a drought, don't forecast rain. That age-old weather wisdom may hold true Friday. Any passing showers look brief and spotty. Milder south breezes blow in a weekend warm up by Saturday.

Instant June 

This weekend will renew your faith that Minnesota summers really are worth the five months of potential Nordic pain we endure from November through March. Low pressure gathers to the west. Southerly breezes pump in milder air. Temperatures make a run at 80 degrees for the first weekend in May.  No mosquito swarms showing up on Doppler. Does it get any better than this?

The warmest ribbon of air, the thermal ridge, slides over Minnesota Sunday afternoon. High push 80 degrees. Long lines at your local Dairy Queen. Shorts and pasty white legs. Stunned Minnesotans stumbling around like scenes from the Walking Dead.

Spring in Minnesota.

Yes those were thunderstorm symbols you saw on the graphic above. As the low approaches, the best chance for a much needed soaking for parts of southern Minnesota looks like Sunday afternoon and evening. Heaviest rains fall south of Minnesota this weekend, but significant rain chances move north as we move into the middle of next week.

The most promising chance for widespread soaking rains? Next Wednesday into Thursday. Below, a look at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's forecast seven-day rainfall totals. Some 1.5- to 2-inch rainfall totals for southern Minnesota in the next week look possible. If the 3 inches or more verifies in southern Iowa, we could be talking about some localized flooding there.

The shift to a wetter pattern I've been talking about for a week now seems to be more likely by next week. That could help some areas of Minnesota dig out of our drought hole this spring.

Stay tuned.

Birth of the modern weather forecast

The Weather Channel blares on your TV. NOAA Weather radio blasts a storm warning. Your phone's favorite flawed weather app spits out another iffy computer generated graphic.

It's easy to take modern weather forecasting for granted. Even easier to take a cheap shot at your local weatherman.

Here's an engaging look from the BBC at how the modern weather forecast, and the British Met Office got started. It took vision, brains, and courage to be among the first weather pioneers. Talk about going out on a limb.

One hundred and fifty years ago Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the celebrated sailor and founder of the Met Office, took his own life. One newspaper reported the news of his death as a "sudden and shocking catastrophe".

Today FitzRoy is chiefly remembered as Charles Darwin's taciturn captain on HMS Beagle, during the famous circumnavigation in the 1830s. But in his lifetime FitzRoy found celebrity not from his time at sea but from his pioneering daily weather predictions, which he called by a new name of his own invention - "forecasts".

There was no such thing as a weather forecast in 1854 when FitzRoy established what would later be called the Met Office. Instead the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade was founded as a chart depot, intended to reduce sailing times with better wind charts.

With no forecasts, fishermen, farmers and others who worked in the open had to rely on weather wisdom - the appearance of clouds or the behaviour of animals - to tell them what was coming. This was an odd scenario - that a bull in a farmer's field, a frog in a jar or a swallow in a hedge-row could detect a coming storm before a man of science in his laboratory was an affront to Victorian notions of rational progress.