Wind field and heights at 500 Millibars or about 18,500 feet above sea level.

After a record-breaking active May it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the first day of meteorological summer. Running from June through August meteorological summer is the three month timeframe where we typically have the atmosphere switch on over to summer. This summer may be a bit atypical with El Nino in place which brings a greater chance of a cooler/more wet summer. Regardless we’ll still see periods of typical summer weather – they just may not cover the next three months continuously.

In the upper levels of the atmosphere we have a trough digging down across the eastern United States this morning. It helped to bring severe thunderstorms and massive travel delays to the Northeast Corridor on Sunday. Being on the west side of the trough will result in light northerly winds aloft today. This pattern will keep us dry and within seasonal norms for late spring. By Tuesday an upper level ridge begin to build in across Southwest Texas and New Mexico resulting in weak upper level winds and quiet weather. Temperatures across Texas will rise this week and we’ll actually start to feel like ‘Texas’ again. Today’s high temperatures will climb into the upper 70s in Northeast Texas into the low to mid 90s across the Permian Basin and parts of the Texas Panhandle.

With the rain over the past month the humidity could become rather uncomfortable this afternoon. Still I’d rather have high humidity versus a wildfire risk. Temperatures tonight will be quite comfortable for early June with upper 50s in the Panhandle and higher elevations in the Alpine Mountains. 60s to lower 70s will be found everywhere else – which still beats the mid to upper 70s we’ve occasionally had to deal with this time of year.

Coinciding with June 1^st is the official start of the Atlantic Hurricane Season. We’ll be focusing on hurricane preparedness this week with several articles on how you and your family can prepare. While storm surge is a huge risk along the Gulf Coast many folks don’t realize that even areas well inland can receive significant impacts from tropical weather. Tornadoes, destructive winds, and flooding are all risks well inland. Some of our most famous Texas hurricanes have actually brought tropical storm force and hurricane force winds to North and East Texas. We’ll have our first hurricane post later this morning. Had Mother Nature not been rampaging all of last week we would have taken part in the usual Hurricane Preparedness week. However we decided to postpone until this week when the weather would be calmer.