Late Update

Chief Meteorologist Craig Carnesi here...

I apologize for the lack of blog updates today, it has been a crazy day around KRBC today. Meetings here and there about things and of course, FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE!

Oh yeah, one other thing, Mother Nature delivering a good dose of severe weather across the Northern Big Country tonight. Strong thunderstorms waited until sunset to fire up tonight. We had a pretty decent cap on the Big Country today. We've talked about caps before, but basically a capping inversion is a warm layer in the middle levels of the atmosphere. The way convection works is by warmer air lifting through air warmer than the surrounding environment. On a "normal" day, air temperatures cool the higher in the atmosphere you go. On a day like today, you have an inversion in the mid-levels, and temperatures actually warm as opposed to cool. Thus, all uplift ceases. You either need a strong lifting force to lift the moister air higher than warmer air, or you have to cool those mid levels down to allow the lifting process to work on its own. Tonight, a combination of both took place with the upper-level low I've been talking about during newscasts sending upper level energy our way and the cooling of the cap at sunset, and boom, strong thunderstorms fired up.

The only reports we've gotten from Haskell and Knox counties have been some golfball sized hail and strong winds in excess of 60 mile per hour. Some isolated areas received up to two inches of rain.

After tomorrow (Saturday) morning, our rain chances come to end until mid-week next week. We should have plenty of moisture around ahead of another strong cold front due in sometime Wednesday.

Please, go out and make it a GREAT weekend everyone!