Very unsettled this week with the ring of fire

Thanks for spending a few minutes here on the blog catching up on what should be a busy week with storms across the Plains. Some of you keep hitting me up on Facebook and Twitter begging for rain. The fact of the matter is that there are several places that need rain. If you didn't see the drought map that was released last week, here's another look.

We are seeing a decent sized area in central Kansas in "abnormally dry", which is the lowest drought category. And that area could be wiped out in the coming weeks with rain on the way. A good 2 or 3 inch rain would put a huge dent in that area. This map will get updated on Thursday.

What is the "ring of fire" - A viewer wrote to me Monday night and said it was something I was making up and that the ring of fire only pertained to volcanoes in the Pacific. Here's what he is referring to.

What I was referencing is the setup of high pressure in the Rockies and storms that nearly go all the way around the high. That's the "ring of fire" in meteorology and it's pretty common at this time of year when the monsoon moisture is coming up through the southwest. This is what will keep our weather active over the next week, perhaps even longer. If you can imagine the winds going clockwise around the "H", most of our active weather will be coming from the east side of the Rockies. It then encounters this very humid air and storms just love to feed off the moisture.

Highest rain chances: Should come from Wednesday night - Friday night. This is when I expect many areas to get the rain we keep talking about. What falls outside of that particular time frame probably won't amount to that much and will be very isolated.

Between now and the end of the week, several computer models give much of Kansas some rain. Now I won't promise that you're going to get the amount you want or need, but at least the chances cover more areas this week than they did last week. Here's the latest look at one forecast models projection of rain between now and Saturday morning:

Perseid Heads Up:

It's one of the better meteor showers that we see during the year. It is expected to peak on the night of August 12th, but you might try and get out this weekend to see a bit of the show. The moon won't be setting until just before dawn, so some of the faint meteors might be washed out by moonlight. So viewing might be better on the morning of the 10th or 11th because we will have a couple of very dark hours at that time.