DayWeather Podcast 05.27.2026

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]When tragedy strikes, Wyoming knows to contact Grant Lawson in a law firm for truck safety, fierce advocate for justice and fighting for safer roads around the USA. Visit truckacs.com and see how Grant and his team can make the difference. Well, we're going to be in a squeeze play. We talked about this yesterday. We'll talk about it again today as the pattern is really going to be a big contrast in air pressure between a deep area of low pressure in the far western United States, a broad area of high pressure over the eastern United States, and a lot of the Rockies and a lot of the western high plains are squeezed in between these two. A lot of you experienced those steady and gusty southeast winds yesterday. Those will continue right on through the next several days. But that transports moisture in a very narrow band from the southeast down in the Gulf Coast region northwestward into the western United States. At the same time, we've got this strong upper level low settling into the Pacific Northwest. So, it's a bit of an interesting dynamic going on. We've got this squeeze play. We've got that deep low in the Pacific Northwest. And we also are going to have small little weather disturbances, little waves rotating counterclockwise around that Pacific Northwest low. And as it moves a little bit more eastward, it will bring those waves in and that will interact with that southeast flow and the moisture and will lead to an uptick in thunderstorm activity gradually over the next 72 to 96 hours.

[00:01:35]It's a blocky pattern. It's not the same blockiness that we had during the winter, but it's blocky more over North America. And what's interesting is this pattern may actually repeat itself. We had a really big moment of deja vu this morning, taking a look at the maps, and I'll show you that here in a moment, as we may see another low come into the Pacific Northwest in June, early June.

[00:02:02]Now, ultimately, this could be very good news for Montana and the Pacific Northwest to to get some precipitation from these upper level lows, but it's not looking like a pattern you would see in early June with the largecale blockiness across North America. I think just kind of a continuation of what we saw during the winter and early spring patterns. It's just in a different location, but nonetheless, it's going to make for some interesting and diverse weather as we go through the last days of May and into the first week of June.

[00:02:35]We'll also have a brief El Nino update for you. Here's a shot for you on the right. Yeah, that's an albino prongghorn analopee as Matthew spotted here this weekend. So, uh, that happens occasionally. You'll get an albino.

[00:02:51]Pretty cool shot there. Not an albino in Colorado Springs, Colorado with that mule deer. Steve sent this a while ago and I forgot to post it. I sorry about that, Steve. But look at that Milky Way shot from Moody County, South Dakota.

[00:03:04]Wow. The Milky Way in the summer season is a great opportunity as you get closer into summer to be able to get some great photographs of the Milky Way. There's those clouds in Bend, Oregon. part is that upper level low that's going to be spinning around in the Pacific Northwest here for the next few days. And it's hail season.

[00:03:33]Yep, we're into hail season. And some of those showers were productive, but only in narrow areas yesterday along and near and west of the I25 corridor and portions of Wyoming down into northern Colorado. And the Timothy Grass in northwest Colorado been able to get a little bit green there with recent storms here in the month of May.

[00:03:56]Speaking of green, greening up nicely near tense sleep there. Beautiful shot.

[00:04:00]Nice shot out of Cedar Edge, Colorado across the western slope. One thing that's going to be apparent is we are going to see different weather from one side of the divide to the other with the southeast UPS slope flow that tends to get the divide and points east with the best chance of precipitation. Boy, you can really see that very thin moisture band, can't you? coming up out of Texas all the way up through here and it goes all the way to Alberta in terms of where this higher humidity air transport is with the low across the Pacific Northwest and the high pressure in the east all making this pressure gradient line up just like this. You can really see it on the water vapor over the next 24 hours. southeastern Colorado and into the panhandles, southwest Kansas and northeast New Mexico, you got a really good chance of some measurable rain in this pattern today as the you can see there's an enhancement in the cloudiness. This is a little upper level wave that's traveling northwestward and that's going to work with that deeper moisture and there you can see that wave. Now, keep an eye on this wave because it's going to do what we call dumbbell around this guy here over the course of the next couple of days and actually go all the way up here, rotating around the upper level low. So, the upper level low will settle into about Tahoe by noon mountain time today.

[00:05:28]So, it's a very similar setup to yesterday. And you can see where the deeper moisture is in the precipitable water by midafternoon today. You can see the deeper moisture across the Pacific Northwest and this pipeline is is coming right on through, but it's a narrow band. So, the results today are going to be similar to yesterday where the showers and thunderstorms are going to be mainly along and west of I25, but maybe slightly more east than they were yesterday. And there you can see the 500 millibar vorticity pattern. These are the maps I show you where the colored areas are where the atmosphere is spinning counterclockwise and there's a vertical motion out ahead of the colors, meaning the air wants to rise out ahead of these areas where there's colors. Now, the darker, brighter colors show you where the vorticity or the spin is a little bit heavier, and that's where you're going to see the the better precipitation out ahead of it. So, this is today. So today is where you're going to see the showers and thunderstorms developing by afternoon and evening. And this area showers and thunderstorms will be moving this way this evening and early tonight into southeast Colorado.

[00:06:37]You can see an active pattern across portions of eastern Oregon going across Idaho into western areas of Montana as that moisture is brought in. One thing that happens, these southeast winds are ups slopes. So that cools the air a little bit and does kind of put a little bit of a lid on the atmosphere in terms of instability. But that instability gets stronger and stronger as we go into tomorrow, as we go into Friday, and as we go into the start of the weekend, as you'll see here in a minute. So, by Thursday afternoon, that little wave comes up and moves more northward. So, this is going to bring more spin to the atmosphere, more instability along with that moisture. The upper level low settles, it's still there into central California. And so we're going to start to see the thunderstorm activity get a little bit more robust into this area right here. And look at the moisture.

[00:07:29]The prediction for thunderstorm activity very active along and east of the Cascades here. Hopefully they can get some beneficial moisture out of this.

[00:07:38]And then as we go on into Friday, you can see there's a lot more color now.

[00:07:43]The showers and thunderstorms get more active. But notice I talked about the divide. The continental divide here pushes that moisture here but leaves a dry slot for western Colorado, eastern Utah, and western areas of Wyoming, while this thunderstorm activity in Utah is associated with the upper level low.

[00:08:01]But we have this gap right here where we may not see much action here in the next three or four days just because the way the pattern is forming. But look at the thunderstorms in Canada all the way down into Big Ben country. And then as we get into Saturday, that same upper level low kind of gets consolidated and dumbbells its way this way, trying to get back up to the jetream in the Omega block pattern. So, it kind of gets stuck right here. So, it's got nowhere to go really but north, back up towards Montana. And so, here you go. This is by noon Saturday. We have a strong area of vorticity over the central Rockies. So, this is going to lead to a pretty active day Saturday of shower and thunderstorm activity out ahead of that wave, especially out into the plains. Now, one thing that we're watching is that we could see across parts of the Dakotas, a good part of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, then back up here into eastern Montana, and maybe into eastern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado, some pretty active shower and thunderstorm activity as we start the weekend. You can see it drier west of the divide because the moisture's consolidated here as that upper level low heads northward. So you're going to see the precipitation pattern look like this through Sunday.

[00:09:21]So you can see we've got some brighter colors right here where the shower and thunderstorm activity will be more active. And look at Montana here back into the Pacific Northwest, even back into the northern Great Basin and Northern Utah here. There's that slot right here that's a bit drier. It's just a pattern. It's just bad luck right here in terms of where the pattern is setting on up. But we could see in this area right here, active days really starting tomorrow and going through the weekend where shower and thunderstorm activity will be more active into these areas.

[00:09:55]So, there's good opportunities for needed precipitation in those areas. And I talked about the pattern repeating.

[00:10:01]No, I'm not showing you a map from today. Look at the date up top here.

[00:10:05]This is June 7th. Sunday, June 7th. This is almost a repeat. We've got a upper level low coming out ahead of it. We've got another deep low settling into the northern Great Basin feeding off another deep low up into the Gulf of Alaska. So now we don't have the strong omega block here, but we have a very similar setup.

[00:10:25]So this could repeat. So the areas that get the action with this current event will get the action possibly with the next event as we go into that latter portions of next week and into the first weekend of June. And notice high pressure resides along the east coast.

[00:10:44]Low pressure along the west coast. So that surface wind will continue to be from that southeast area. So that's a moisture pump into these areas here and back into here. So we'll just see what happens. But the weather patterns will do this at times. You'll see the pattern repeat. We saw that with the storm in early May, then that storm two weeks later. So, here we go with a with a pattern sort of repeating itself again.

[00:11:10]A quick Elnino update. You can see that the sea surface temperature anomalies now make it across with the brighter colors. The anomaly strongest off the coast of South America. We still have this very stubborn patch right here that uh is still a little bit on the cool side of things, but we certainly have got that El Nino forming. And I'm going to talk about this here before the week's over. Uh when we start talking about the North American monsoon pattern getting started in June with the warmer water temperatures right here, we'll we'll take a look at that before the week is over. If you look at the El Nino index though, we call it the Nino 3.4 four index. You can see that we're at 659 Celsius anomaly on the plus side.

[00:11:53]0.5 is where you technically are into El Nino status, but notice it kind of has plateaued a little bit, dropped a little bit. Those warmer water temperatures just below the surface, there's they're still not completely up on top yet.

[00:12:06]Nonetheless, the El Nino certainly is forming and coming together. Have yourself a good Wednesday. See you tomorrow.