Bud Update

Tropical cyclone Bud is still churning to the south of Cabo San Lucas, but is weakened from a hurricane to a tropical storm.  The satellite loop below from the great tropicaltidbits.com site shows the low center slow moving northward with rainbands moving across southern Baja California and near the coast of the Mexican staet of Sinaloa.

Source: tropicaltidbits.com

The forecast models still call for the remnants of Bud and it's associated tropical moisture to move across the U.S. southwest late Friday and Saturday.  This will bring showers and thunderstorms to portions of the four corners states, as illustrated by the NAM forecasts valid 1200 UTC (6 AM MDT) Saturday and 000 UTC Sunday (6 PM MDT Saturday).

The transition in the four corners area is going to be quite remarkable.  Currently, a good chunk of eastern Utah and western Colorado is under red flag conditions, as illustrated by the pink shading below.

Source: NWS

Translation: Right now, that area is experiencing hot, dry, and windy conditions.  Saturday, dewpoints and humidities will be higher, with showers and thunderstorms.  

While the brief return of moisture will probably be a nice change, I'm not sure that Bud is going to bring a significant salve to the drought conditions experienced in that region.  You simply can't make up for an entire winter of precipitation deficit in such a short period of time.  In addition, there is potential for lightning to spark new fires.  We'll have to see how this plays out, but the view that this is going to be a long fire season still holds in that region.  

Meanwhile, here in northern Utah, it's a sufferfest.  The minimum temperature at the Salt Lake City airport was 77ºF, which will be a record high minimum for the date if temperatures don't fall by midnight tonight.

It was a warm one last night! Thus far our "low" last night was 77°. Currently 80° at the @slcairport. Assuming it doesn't drop significantly before midnight, we'll easily smash the old record of 73°. #utwx

— NWS Salt Lake City (@NWSSaltLakeCity) June 14, 2018

My dawn ride on the BST was not refreshing.