Summary: West Michigan Weather is continuing to track the potential for thunderstorms and attendant severe weather threats for the remainder of the weekend and into early next week as a rather common summer-time weather pattern has set up. This pattern, known as "Ridge Riders Pattern" or "Ring of Fire", often prompts some of our more appreciable severe weather events during summer-time here in West Michigan.
As we mentioned yesterday, however, this pattern is rather well-known for being very difficult to forecast accurately in advance and we often see last-minute changes, typically upgrades to more threatening severe weather chances, to these forecasts. Just because we are only in a Level 1/5 or Level 2/5 risk for these days does not mean they should be discounted at all and both the local NWS offices and the Storm Prediction Center have been quoted as saying "higher severe outlook probabilities may be needed" for each day in this sequence.
Tonight (Saturday 07/13) Into Sunday (07/14) Morning:
A large pool of instability will be in place, especially to our West across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. This will allow for storm development over Minnesota and Wisconsin sometime after 5:00 PM local time this evening.
These storms will likely combine into a line and ride out over Lake Michigan shortly after Midnight. As these storms begin their journey out over the lake this evening nighttime cooling will be ongoing here across Western Lower Michigan. This nighttime cooling will have removed nearly all of the instability here in West Michigan by the time thunderstorms reach the Eastern shoreline of West Michigan around 2:00-5:00 AM. Because of the lack of substantial instability, these storms will likely be in the process of weakening and will likely not be of severe strength when they move over West Michigan. However, an isolated strong to severe storm cannot be entirely ruled out. Any strong to severe storm that does manage to persist into West Michigan will pose a primarily damaging wind gust threat of 40-60 MPH.
Sunday (07/14) Afternoon & Evening:
Additional thunderstorm development is possible in the afternoon and evening on Sunday especially south of the I-96 corridor mainly after 4:00 PM.
While this threat may be more appreciable and may eventually warrant higher outlook probabilities from the SPC, it is also more conditional in nature. This is because that it will have to contend with the environment left behind by, and any remnants of, the morning shower and thunderstorm activity.
Morning shower and thunderstorm activity, as discussed above, will likely inhibit substantial instability from rebuilding into the afternoon and evening across West Michigan.
However, current model guidance suggests that this new storm development will be able to overcome the lack of instability or suggests that the instability recovery, however meager, will be supportive of new storm development posing a threat for damaging winds of 40-60 MPH and small to large hail up to 1 inch in diameter.
Monday (07/15) Afternoon & Evening:
Details are not as clear about Monday afternoon and evening as of yet due to the extended range of the forecast and the fact that there may very well be ongoing shower and thunderstorm activity overnight on Sunday into Monday morning. Regardless, a more appreciable, and perhaps more potent, severe weather setup looks favorable for Monday evening. Similarly to this evening, shower and thunderstorm activity is expected to develop over Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, and perhaps, far Eastern Wisconsin. Following this thunderstorm development to our West one of two possible scenarios will occur likely yielding very similar results.
Thunderstorms develop, briefly intensify, then die out. Then new thunderstorm activity develops downstream of the aforementioned dying activity and rapidly intensifies.
Thunderstorms develop, briefly intensify, weaken, and then undergo rapid re-intensification
Either way, thunderstorms will intensify and then congeal into a liner segment and propagate Southeast towards lower Michigan posing a damaging wind threat that could be relatively widespread and possibly intense/significant. However, those details are much to far out to nail down more than that.
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