We have been socked in low clouds for the past 4 to 5 days with this past Monday afternoon offering a narrow peek of sun. Otherwise, we haven’t seen area-wide sunshine since last Thursday, and that was after some morning fog. Low stratus clouds will generally clear the area this morning, leaving us with a sunny afternoon. You’ll want to enjoy it though, as tomorrow’s weather will offer another round of low clouds, probably by mid-morning, then expanding through the afternoon.
The image you see on the right is an image capture of a vertical profile of the atmosphere. This is valid Thursday in the early afternoon and uses model data. The software package used is a free version of BUFKIT, which uses model data and
displays vertical profiles of the atmosphere. BUFKIT is used extensively here at TV9 to look at temperature trends, clouds trends, winter precipitation types, and most importantly, severe weather. In this particular model set, it is showing a thick layer of stratus clouds right around 925mb, which is about 1,500 ft to 2,000 ft off the ground. Cloud bases could easily be down below 1,000 ft at times. These clouds will likely form due to moisture from a melting snowpack in southwest Iowa that gets blown northeastward into our cooler air. I’ve circled in yellow the batch of clouds that’ll likely form. They’ll be just thick enough to cloud us all over on Thursday. Plenty of sun above those clouds though.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see stratus linger through Saturday. All the more reason to enjoy today!
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