Friday, Sep. 2 & Saturday, Sep. 3 Outlook
Friday, Sep. 2 & Saturday, Sep. 3 Outlook
Unsettled weather continues for DFW, though American's associated waiver only covers travel originally booked for today (for now?)
Welcome to any new readers! And as a reminder to long-ish time readers, we’re testing a new format for these outlooks. To both old and new—we’re grateful you’re here.
If you have questions about the content of this outlook, the answers might be in this post (we keep adding to it). Otherwise, let us know if something doesn’t make sense (we welcome feedback of all kinds!).
Friday, September 2
Our Holt-Winters forecast thinks 2.193 million travelers will go through TSA checkpoints, however doesn’t see the holiday. Accordingly, we’re inclined towards the higher end of its prediction interval (+0.5σ is 2.26 million and we’d probably take the over); last year, checkpoint volumes were up 15% week-over-week.
High pressured anchored over the Great Basin will keep a disturbance in place over Texas; combined with ample tropical moisture, showers and thunderstorms—possibly heavy—are expected during afternoon and early evening. Storm movement will be slow (though relatively short in duration). American has a waiver out covering DFW travel today… we’ll see if it get’s extended to cover travel tomorrow.
Moisture will also be plentiful for South Florida (owing to a robust easterly flow), though mid/late morning is favored for thunderstorm development. While chances were apparently too low to include on the map, a weak cold front drops through the Denver area and may spark a few showers and thunderstorms.
Saturday, September 3
We forecast TSA will screen 1.912 million travelers (± 0.5σ, or a prediction interval of about 38%, is 1.85-1.97 million travelers).
Precipitation chances will continue to climb into Saturday around ATL as easterly flow eats away at drier air. Finally, autumn1 kicks off with a potentially record-breaking heat wave across the West may cause payload problems for departures from Las Vegas and Phoenix as well as smaller airports like Sacramento, Ontario, Palm Springs,
You can check out2 hourly estimates in this workbook.
In the interest of injecting some variety to our Twitter profile, we’re going to experiment with AI image generators. In this case, we used Stable Diffusion’s DreamStudio and the prompt was “golden hour at airport, first day of fall, trending on art station.”
While it links to a Google Sheet, it’s an Excel file and relies on the XLOOKUP function, which does not exist in Sheets. You can download the file and open in Excel, which should resolve the #NAME? error; if any readers don’t have Excel, let us know and we can work on a solution.