Thursday, Sep. 15 & Friday, Sep. 16 Outlook

Remnants of Kay move from Northern Rockies to Upper Great Lakes; peeking at weather for Dorkfest, SpotLAX

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!).

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Thursday, September 15

We forecast TSA will screen 2.172 million travelers (± 0.5σ, or a prediction interval of about 38%, is 2.11-2.23 million travelers).

Remnants of Tropical Cyclone Kay spread from the Northern Rockies into Upper Great Lakes. Scattered showers and thunderstorms should develop in the mountains west of DEN then become more isolated as they quickly move into lower elevations. The picture in DEN is somewhat muddied by a radar outage (pun intended) until Oct. 3.

Daytime heating combines with a stalled front across the Florida peninsula to produce thunderstorms—though not included in our automation, we’d watch for en-route initiatives for Jacksonville Center (especially because convection extends into the Central Gulf).

Friday, September 16

Not a typo or unedited paste: we also forecast TSA will screen 2.172 million travelers on Friday (± 0.5σ, or a prediction interval of about 38%, is 2.11-2.23 million travelers).

Generally favorable weather is forecast across the NAS for travel to SpotLAX and Dorkfest¹, including Los Angeles itself—stratus holds off until late Friday and west configuration maintained under moderate onshore flow. We’ll glance at Saturday’s spotting weather in our Friday post.

You can check out² hourly estimates in this workbook.

1. We asked Stable Diffusion’s DreamStudio to add In-N-Out Burger to the background of Seth Miller’s photo from last year… we rather appreciate its interpretation.

2. 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.