March Madness?

2-29-24 4pm. This March update is brought to you by 5E Trailers in Marion. They’re here to help you find the perfect trailer at the best price! https://www.5etrailers.com/

This post will be saved in my “Long-Range” forecast page so we can look at this post in April and see how things panned out in March!

First of all, let’s look at March average rainfall totals…for San Antonio, March is one of the drier months of the year, with an average rainfall total of 1.90 inches. While other locations in south-central and south Texas will be different, March is considered a fairly dry month.

With that said, let’s look at some of the latest forecasts. Please don’t forget to take these long-range models with a “grain of salt and a shot of Tequila!” The latest CPC outlook for March is leaning towards greater than 50/50 odds for drier than normal conditions for us and equal odds for our temperatures to average below or normal.

Now, let’s look at the latest 30-day Euro, GFS and CFS models for March. The 30-day GFS and Euro models are forecasting pretty close to normal rainfall for March and the harder to read, CFS, is predicting above normal rainfall totals. When I ran the models, I noticed that all of them started off pretty dry but turned wetter the second half of March. That seems logical to me, since we tend to start seeing more thunderstorms as we move towards April and May.

The 30-day GFS model is forecasting pretty close to normal rainfall for March.

The 30-day Euro model is forecasting pretty close to normal rainfall for March.

The 30-day CFS model is forecasting above normal rainfall for March.

To prove my point about March starting off dry, let’s now look at the latest 8-14 day outlook, along with four model runs through March 10th. While some are forecasting some rain for our area, there is no major rain event on the horizon. Hopefully we will see at least some rain in about a week, but for now, totals appear to be less than a half of an inch for most of south-central and south Texas.

There you have it…I’m hoping March surprises us with more rain than the models are predicting, but we will just have to wait and see, as usual!