It’s mid-May, and students are getting ready to finish their school year and start enjoying summer break. It’s shorts and t-shirt time for most of us, and it’s only going to get hotter. For people like me who prefer summer over everything else, this is fantastic news. That means that the out look for late May isn’t fantastic for people such as myself.

Unlike the previous Omega block, we aren’t expecting a static pattern in the upper atmosphere, but rather a repetitive one. There won’t be a standing trough, but one that keeps reappearing over and over again. Regardless of the cause, the result is the same: reinforcement of Canadian air and temperatures that aren’t quite where we expect them to be.

More often than not through the end of the month, there projects to be an upper level trough and more unsettled weather than normal from the Mississippi to the Mid-Atlantic and north through New England. The cooler temperatures beneath the trough, and more pertinently, under clouds and swirling areas of low pressure will mean a late May that isn’t as sweltering as we have grown accustomed to.

We had one other unfortunate reminder today. The was the cooler lobe is sinking into the eastern part of the country, there will be a ring of fire, so to speak, on the periphery, with a severe season lasting later than it normally does into late May. It doesn’t look particularly wet, but I expect it to be fairly stormy.

It is in the 90s across most of North Dakota today. Within the next hour or so, I would venture to guess that every reporting site in the state will be at or greater than 90.

That’s hot anywhere, and particularly in mid-May in North Dakota. The thing about North Dakota is that it is higher latitude than almost all of the rest of the contiguous United States, and it falls within the northern High Plains. This leaves the place vulnerable to temperature swings like the one that swung temperatures into the 90s for the early part of the week, but also 50 degrees cooler (for highs!) by the end of the week.

A meandering and fairly useless blob of low pressure in the southeast is going to rob a developing system in the Upper Midwest of a lot of it’s convective oomph, and that’s probably for the best, given the pool of cold air it is going to pull in behind it on Thursday and into Friday.

These are the forecast low temperatures for Friday night into Saturday morning. Make no mistake, after starting the week in the mid 90s, it is completely reasonable to believe there might be some snow in North Dakota and northern Minnesota over the weekend. Fortunately, there won’t be too much in the way of severe weather as this low gets going and the cold winds start blowing.

That’s actually a 60+ degree drop in a few days for parts of North Dakota this week. Can’t they enjoy spring even just for a little bit?

The month of April was dynamic in a way that May hasn’t been. I’ve often said that when the weather gets wilder, The Weather Channel gets better. This thing that I say so often and everyone has heard me say bore fruit again, as they had tie for the top forecast in the month of April. I guess I need to have a similar expression for WeatherNation, who joined TWC at the top of the charts.

There sure aren’t a lot of destinations between Denver and Killeen, but it is a thirteen hour drive, which means we will take a break after the first 8 hours. It’s an 882 hour difference between the two towns, which we will cover at a pace of 65.3mph on the highways through the high plains. At that pace, we will surpass 522 miles before we stop for the night.

DAY ONE (Monday)

Low pressure over the 4 Corners is spiraling away in the base of the left lobe of our Omega blocking pattern, which means persistent rain and storms in the Rockies, and some scattered but unimpressive shower activity on the eastern slope of the Rockies. Unfortunately, that will be exactly where we are driving. Expect it to be wet from eastern Colorado to the Texas Panhandle at times, but with cloudy conditions throughout. Fortunately, this part of the world, and the type of system churning away won’t yet be conducive for really nasty weather. We will stop near New Deal, Texas, which is just north of Lubbock.

DAY TWO (Tuesday)

The feature will emerge from the Rockies overnight and into the morning on Tuesday. The weather position over the Gulf and in the lee of the Rockies will mean more assertive thunderstorm activity through central Texas, but it will be shifting out of our route by mid afternoon. It may even be crisp with quite a bit of sun as we head from the flat, agrarian Lubbock, to the flat, military Killeen.