The weekend in Houston is good but how much rain will we get next week?

Despite the passing of a cold front, the weather in Southeast Texas looks good enough to take your friends and family to the opening of City Lights in downtown Houston.

We expect skies to be partly cloudy Saturday with afternoon highs in the low to mid 70s, near our seasonal average, with light north winds.

A high pressure system will form briefly on Saturday before turning east. Returning airflow around the spreading high pressure system will shift our winds to the more southeasterly late Saturday night, bringing moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and more clouds into Sunday. We can expect morning low temperatures to drop into the 50s and 60s.

The next major storm system is expected to hit Texas on Sunday as a warm front moves north through the state. This will lead to higher temperatures, active southerly winds, and the return of dense cloud cover. Temperatures on Sunday will be in the low to mid 70s with winds gusting up to 15 mph.

The second part of the storm system will arrive Monday as a cold front, moving across western and northern Texas during the day and then reaching central and southeast Texas later at night. We’ll have plenty of time for a warming trend during the afternoon as high temperatures reach near 80 degrees. That’s just a few degrees shy of the record day set in 2011 at 84 degrees.

Rain chances will be low on Monday with only some scattered showers expected. However, the chances of rain overnight rise to 60% and continue into Tuesday at 20%. Rainfall totals will be steady, ranging from a tenth of an inch to three-quarters of an inch across the state.

Regarding the Thanksgiving holiday, weather forecast models see two possible scenarios for Thursday: one wet and the other dry and cold.

The global forecast model indicates that a large low pressure system will move across Texas on Thanksgiving, which could lead to wet conditions during the holiday.

However, when you look at other models, such as the European and Canadian, nothing appears but dry air and cold temperatures. Meteorologists prefer to tread lightly in such situations because we don’t like to put all our trust in one forecast model over another. In this case, the GFS is considered exceptional and its predictions will likely not be met. The National Weather Service gave a good description of exactly this situation:

At this point, it’s too early to say which scenario will play out, but we can expect some minor adjustments to the forecast with a 20% chance of rain in Houston. It will also be cold with lows likely in the 30s and 40s, but temperatures will rise to the upper 50s and lower 60s by the afternoon.