DayWeather Podcast 5.28.2026

Added: 2026-05-29

[00:00:00]Welcome to Thursday. It's May 28th, 2026. Winter's over and construction season is here. Grant Lawson and law firm for Truck Safety wants to remind everyone that construction zones can create hazards with changing traffic patterns and heavy equipment occupying our roads. Large trucks are involved in 33% of all fatal work zone crashes. Be alert, stay safe, and as always, slow down. When lives are at stake, there's no room for mistakes. Visit truck accidents.com and see how Grant and his team can make a difference here in Wyoming. The Omega block, this very strong blocking pattern here at the end of May is going to really dictate everything. Here we are once again looking at an Omega block. We've had a lot of them as we all know going back to November, but this time it's centered in a different location across the globe.

[00:00:48]What it's going to do is force the low in the Pacific Northwest and into the northern Great Basin northnortheastward through the northern Rockies in the southern Canada. That's where we have a potentially wet weather pattern. Badly needed rain for Montana, the far northern counties of Wyoming, especially northwestern Wyoming into Idaho, the Dakotas in Saskatchewan and Alberta going to be very, very wet. Parts of the Pacific Northwest as well. Elsewhere, it's going to be more of a scattered shower and thunderstorm pattern because the concentration of moisture is going to be really forced into this omega block. At the end of this video, we're going to talk about the North American monsoon. We're headed in the June. It's the time of year to start talking about the southwestern United States and how that monsoon may or may not develop. Is it developing? Will it develop? All of those things. Taking a look at some photos across the region. Got a nice shot of the moononglow there in Colorado. How about that for a shot with an isolated thunderstorm popping up with that lightning strike in southwest Montana. Going to be seeing more of that up there here soon. And just a nice southeasterly ups slope into Essis Park.

[00:01:59]Last couple of days that southeast UPS slope wind has brought clouds, cool, moist air into portions of Colorado and the high plains and that upslope producing some rain and just a lot of cool moist conditions. And that trend is going to continue today, tomorrow, and into early Saturday. And you can see that moisture increasing ahead of that upper level low. A nice cumulus congested cloud building up there over the Big Horns yesterday. Satellite photos show things very, very well.

[00:02:31]We've got three features we want to talk about. There's this southeast flow of air that we've had all week. Here's your upper level low parked over Tahoe. And this will go into our discussion here in a moment about the monsoon. But we've got subtropical moisture getting drawn ahead of this upper level low here. So we've got the strong southeast flowing gradient, the pressure gradient here, the upper level low, moisture increasing up from the south. And this is all going up and into the omega block pattern which is right here. We've got this little arm of this upper level low right here that is going to get forced this way. It can't go east. It's got to get forced up over and around the high. Same thing with this guy here. This low up in the Gulf of Alaska is going to try to move and then push this up this way. So, with this omega blocking pattern, things can't go the way they normally do. So that's why the direction of this upper level low like this is where the concentration of the moisture will be for. So if we just step through today, this is at noon mountain time today, noon mountain time tomorrow, it really can't go very far. But then as we get into Saturday, it starts to work its way northward, making its track this way. What's really interesting is is that this actually over time is going to end up going through here because it's got a roadblock.

[00:03:58]classic omega block pattern right here forming. So that's going to concentrate a lot of weather up here where this upper level low's got nowhere to go and it's drawing as you saw in that satellite photo deep moisture in from the southern latitudes. So what we're going to do by Sunday is have it right up over Montana heading into southern Canada. That is going to be good news for Montana and the northern areas as you'll see here in a minute as well as parts of Oregon, Idaho, and southern Alberta and Saskatchewan up into the prairie provinces are going to do very well with this. So, the thunderstorm pattern today very similar to last couple of days. We have these streaky areas of showers and thunderstorms that come up. They have they've had a hard time really getting further northward in Wyoming, but today they should have a little bit of a better opportunity. And as we go and watch this area of moisture get coalesed, we see the shower and thunderstorm coverage Friday get a bit more extensive and a bit more stronger and robust. And you can see a very active pattern up here into Montana, southern Canada of the showers and thunderstorms. And this is where we're going to be on Saturday as it lifts northward. So the precipitation potential through Sunday, this is through Sunday, looks very good. very confident of this area of heavier moisture right here where I'm where I'm drawing the line. I think there's a really good opportunity to see well over an inch of rain in these areas up here.

[00:05:30]This does get into northern areas of Wyoming. We'll talk about that here in a minute. And we've got this concentration of rain along the east sides of the Cascades and the northern mountains of California where we could see some really good rainfall here over the next 24 to 36 hours or so. Then in the southeast flow, an active pattern of showers and thunderstorms across Nebraska and the Dakotas. And some of that does push back into the front range areas. But we do have a little bit of a hole right here and a little bit of a hole right here where the moisture can't get into. If we focus in a little bit more, you can see there's going to be a good concentration of moisture up into these areas here and into potentially the Big Horn Basin of Northern Wyoming.

[00:06:15]And you can see it gets right down to the Out Creek Mountains here, then maybe just along and north of Interstate 90.

[00:06:21]I'll say this, I'm I'm using the European model here, which is a good model, the best one out there. I'm not so certain of the rain right here.

[00:06:32]So, I'm hoping this comes to fruition, but this is one area I'm not so sure about. So for Sheridan, Buffalo, Gillette over to over to Sundance into the Black Hills of South Dakota, the model is showing a really good rain.

[00:06:46]However, this is one area where we we'll examine this tomorrow. Things need to come together for that to happen.

[00:06:52]Nonetheless, there's going to be some areas that are going to really benefit from this precipitation pattern. So, let's talk about the North American monsoon. As we get into the month of June, this is when we start looking for it. What drives the North American monsoon?

[00:07:10]It's very seasonal in terms of when it can get going. A couple of things need to be in place from terms of what the low pressure and high pressure systems need to do. The heat of the deserts, which really gets going in June because of the long days and the short nights, is the deserts of Mexico in the desert southwest heats up from Southern California through Arizona up into the Great Basin up here into New Mexico. And this causes an area of low pressure to naturally form. The hotter the air is, the less dense it is, the lower the pressure. We also tend as we get into the summer season have a high more often than not want to be over the southern plains. So I always show you these circulation patterns. The clockwise rotation around the high, the counterclockwise rotation around the heat low that develops into the desert southwest just naturally brings drawing that moisture more northward. So you kind of need this configuration and this is a very idealized graphic. Okay, this is kind of like the the perfect setup for the monsoon, but you can see we've got the low in the deserts near the Baja here. You've got the high in the southern plains and the circulation patterns work together. Then you always have to watch where the jetream is because the jetream acts as the door.

[00:08:34]The jetream can go way far north and allow the monsoon to go way far north.

[00:08:40]But the jetream can also at times cut the head off of the monsoon and block it from getting any further north. And that happens frequently. So again, this is idealized. Things change in our dynamic, but we want to start watching for this high here, this low here to start to form in the heat of summer. That draws the moisture northward. A critical factor to this is the sea surface temperature anomalies in the Gulf of California and off the west coast of Mexico and in the Gulf. Those sea surface temperature anomalies are important because if the waters are cool, they release less water vapor into the air and the monsoon isn't as robust.

[00:09:20]When the sea surface temperatures are warmer, you get more water going into the air and the monsoon has more potential to become stronger, produce more rain. And from several studies, the temperature that is the temperature, let's say, that gets it started is when the sea surface temperatures are right around 80°, 79, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, 26 C. And when they get warmer than that is when you really start to see the monsoon really kicking into gear. So what we want to do this time of year is well what are those sea surface temperature anomalies doing? Are they warmer or are they colder? You know one thing that we've also learned is that when it's been a cold winter in Mexico, a cold winter in Arizona relatively speaking that keeps those sea surface temperatures cooler to start the monsoon season. But what we have, as you'll see here in a minute, are some pretty warm waters. Another thing to point out, we talk about interanual variability all the time with precipitation in the western United States. There's a lot of intraanual variability to the monsoon season. If you look at just a little bit of a precipitation graph for July to August precipitation in New Mexico, you can see how much variability there is yeartoear. So you don't usually have two monsoons that are exactly the same.

[00:10:43]That's why you can never count on last year to be an indication how this coming year will be with the monsoon. It varies a lot. When we look at sea surface temperature anomalies, wherever you see orange or red here into the darker colors, that means those sea surface temperature anomalies are warmer. So they're they're much warmer. So this this is an anomaly map, but this doesn't show us what the actual temperatures are. If we take a look at the actual temperatures, if you look down here at the graph, when we go to 26 C, 79 degrees Fahrenheit, you can see into the Gulf of California, those water temperatures are going all the way up.

[00:11:22]And these are the water temperatures you need to start the monsoon. Same goes here into the Gulf. We still have this patch where it's a little bit cooler, which is to be expected here in the far northern part of the Gulf of California.

[00:11:34]But this little tiny wedge of water, it's not very tiny, but it looks relatively speaking. These two areas of sea surface temperature anomalies are already at the critical temperature right here to start the monsoon season.

[00:11:49]And if we step forward in time into the month of June and then into the middle of June, you're going to see how this may ma manifest itself. And if we zoom in a little bit more, you can see the temperature right here that we need is already creeping up into the Gulf of California rather strongly. So that means over the next few weeks, we should start to see more moisture work its way into Mexico and Central America than into the southwestern United States. So let's look at precipitable water over time. So this is for Sunday, this upcoming Sunday, May 31st. You can see we've got dry air over New Mexico, northwest Mexico into Arizona, and parts of the southwestern United States. Here we've got a patch of green where there's going to be some showers and thunderstorms down here. If we just kind of step through the end of May and then into the third of June, you can see that we're starting to draw moisture in, but really what you see is a little bit further on because I really wouldn't call this technically the monsoon season starting here yet on June 3rd, but we see moisture wanting to come into the southwest United States. Let's jump to June 9th. This is where we're starting to see it manifest itself. And as we go into the 12th of June, you can see we've got 300% precipitable waters into Southern Arizona, into the deserts of Southern California. So this would indicate, and again, we've got to watch that jetream. This would indicate an early start to the summer monsoon down there. Sometimes they don't get started till early July. Sometimes they do start in June. Looks like there's the potential that it will. Why? the jetream starts to go more north and we've got the sea surface temperature anomalies in place ready to kick that into action.

[00:13:36]And that's something that's going to be very important for Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado early in the ball game.

[00:13:44]Once we get into July and August, the monsoon moisture tends to work its way further north into the central high plains and central Rockies. How far north it goes is critical and that's just something we'll just have to keep track of and watch in the weeks ahead.

[00:14:00]Have yourself a great Thursday.