First, I want to urge you to not buy into the hype. What hype you ask? Well, a number of weather forecasters, including some of our local weather guys, have tweeted over the weekend about the possibility of a tropical storm or hurricane hitting the upper Texas coast next weekend. More on it in detail below, but suffice it to say you definitely should not freak out.
Now, onto the weather at hand. It was another hot weekend with puffy clouds floating around but not much moisture. The best we could do is occasionally get a little shade from passing clouds and a handful of extremely scattered afternoon showers.
There isn't much in the forecast to suggest that exact same trend won't continue for the work week. Through Thursday, highs should be in the low to mid 90s under partly cloudy skies with only a slight chance of a stray afternoon shower or thunderstorm if we're lucky. Probably a good week for a beach vacation, but it won't be much fun in the concrete jungle.
On Friday and into the weekend, rain chance do increase, a nod to an area of tropical weather that will probably move into the western Gulf of Mexico by then. But, the chances of it spawning a tropical storm or hurricane are low.
Ok, let's dig a bit into those dire forecasts. They are the result of a run of one of the computer forecasting models, the GFS. While it has been a moderately reliable model overall, this particular run was just one of the forecasts. The ensemble (a whole bunch of different runs with tweaks made each time) show a very mild disturbance moving inland by Monday somewhere between the upper Texas coast and as far east as Florida.
It's very well explained by the guys at Space City Weather here.
The other forecast model everyone relies on, the European, doesn't develop anything over the next ten days, and the National Hurricane Center isn't calling for any development over the next five days, which is probably the most definitive forecast of all.
Now, there is a chance we get some rain out of this, which is pretty normal for us throughout the summer. Tropical disturbances often stir up showers and thunderstorms, which is simply part of the climatology of the area. But, it is nothing to be concerned about at the moment.