Our weather should stay rather sedate as we head into the weekend with slight rain chances for our Thursday with decreasing rain chances Friday into the weekend. A summer ridge of high pressure will strengthen over the area this weekend into early next week serving to squelch any afternoon storm activity. So after Thursday our rain chances will likely lower to 10% or less through early next week. The tropics are looking more summer-like too with an area of disturbed weather on the Eastern Pacific side of Central America looking a little more organized. This system will likely fester across portions of Central America and perhaps translate into the extreme Northwestern Caribbean with time. The longer range models continue to show lower pressures across this area into next week with some northward drift toward the Gulf by the latter part of the first week of June. Since high pressure will dominate over our part of the world well into next week, I would not look for this system to make a definitive move through the next 4-5 days, but it could certainly get more interesting beyond that time-frame.
On a side note, I was invited to participate in The National Weather Service’s Bayou Vermilion River Conference earlier today. The object of this conferenceis to get government entities and the emergency preparedness community involved with current research and modeling of the river, including activities at the Bayou Vermilion District, and how to better understand the behavior of the bayou/river with all its major quirks. The Vermilion is a very different body of water that can flood quickly in heavy rain events, reverse flow northward, and can act like a retention pond depending on the scope and intensity of any given weather event. We just recently experienced how quickly the river can rise last Thursday when the level at Surrey Street rose to over 11ft. My part of the conference was to present some historical weather events that have impacted the Vermilion. The graphic here depicts the top 6 river crests on record and the weather events that led to flooding. Interestingly enough, the top 20 weather events were evenly spread across winter, fall and spring systems to summer tropical events. The last major flood with the river occurred 
during the week that Tropical Storm Allison (or rather the weak low pressure circulation inland across Texas) in 2001 which pounded the area
with 10-32 inch rains. Hopefully this conference will be a starting point for a more pro-active reckoning with this body of water and all its tributaries and coulees. The resounding note through-out this conference is that the ever-present flooding threat that this river poses, and that similar rainfall events of the past will likely lead to much worse flooding in the future due to our urban growth and sprawl. With the always dynamic weather of our area, severe flooding along this river seems a certainty.