Warm winds Wednesday arrive before rain and potential thunderstorms. Smaller showers will also race through before the primary batch of rain arrives between midday and early afternoon, and once that arrives, be on the lookout for some damaging winds.

Even before the rain, winds will regularly be 10-20 mph on Wednesday, with the gustiest winds happening as the most intense rain moves through. But there likely won't be much thunder and lightning to go with the strongest winds.

In weather circles, you may hear this called a HSLC situation — meaning High Shear and Low CAPE. This means a couple of things.

First, the wind direction and speed is changing very dramatically and rapidly over a short distance upward in the atmosphere. That change in wind speed and direction in the vertical direction is the high shear.

Second, CAPE is short for Convective Available Potential Energy. Simplified, it signals how high in the atmosphere individual showers and thunderstorms can grow upward in the atmosphere.

With the low CAPE, individual storms do not climb as high, so thunder and lightning are not as likely to develop. But, the high shear means that the strong winds a few thousand feet overhead might briefly work down toward ground level in any individual shower.

And on Wednesday, those winds a few thousand feet up will be around 70 mph.

The outcome on Wednesday in Richmond will be pockets of intense rain and wind gusts beyond 50 mph, but the usual thunder and lightning to give us a natural audio or visual clue that a storm is coming may not be present. 

Tornadoes?

The strong shear also means there is a very small, but non-zero, chance of a tornado developing in one of these squalls. Typically, a tornado that forms in this environment is small and short-lived, generally lasting less than 30 minutes. 

So if you get a Severe Thunderstorm or Tornado Warning on your phone, respect the warning. In a situation like this, the simplest thing to do is just get inside and stay away from windows.

Afterwards

Once the last of the rain exits in the evening, the sky will clear as the winds shift direction from south to northwest. By around 9 p.m Wednesday evening, the damaging wind threat ends.

Aside from another windy day Thursday, the weather will be fairly quiet through the weekend.

A few showers may squeak through Saturday morning before the sky turns sunny in the afternoon as the temperature climbs into the low 60s.

On Sunday, we expect a storm to cross west to east across the Carolinas. There is a small chance it could slide just far enough north to bring Richmond some rain, but right now, that does not seem likely. Either way, it will be cooler on Sunday, holding around 50 in the afternoon.

Winter review

Meteorological winter ended on February 28 — defined as the three coldest calendar months of the year. This was the first winter that was colder than average in Richmond since 2014-15, where we are using the 100-year running average since 1915.

Both December and February were just a smidgen (less than one degree) above the 30-year normal, meaning January did all of the work this winter in bringing down the temperature average. At 4.8 degrees colder than normal, it was the coldest January since 2004.

And we finally got some snow. To be fair, we can still get snow in March, and even in April once in a while. But this season's total of 11.7 inches was the most since 2018-19, which is also the last time we had more snow than the 100-year average amount: 9.7 inches.

NOAA

You may have heard about the cuts at the National Weather Service and its parent organization, NOAA. Worse, there was word late last week that the new administration was not going to renew the lease of one of its primary forecasting sites just outside of Washington.

This would have a brutal impact on all weather forecasts, as the backbone of American weather data comes through that site. Simply shutting it down without a plan for redundancy means forecasts would degrade substantially, and many forecast apps would simply stop working.

A couple of my colleagues shared their concerns.

“Devastating doesn’t even begin to describe the damage this will do to scientific progress, real-time alerting, real-time monitoring, and forecasting too. You can’t just magically rebuild this infrastructure with a change in administrations. It took decades to get to where we are today, providing billions in return on investment nationally and countless lives saved. This is a type of irreparable damage that takes decades to even recover from.”

- Matt Lanza, The Eyewall, Houston

“The administration's approach defies common sense and sound management principles. In the private sector, such haphazard decision-making is well known to be a formula for failure. But when applied to government agencies tasked with keeping Americans safe, it’s not just counterproductive, it’s dangerous”

 - Bryan Norcross, Fox Weather, Miami

It may not seem like a big deal right now. But tearing down the critical American weather infrastructure will degrade forecasting, leading to losses in life and property as offices remain understaffed and hardware goes unmaintained.

It is like permanently losing your electricity on a pleasant spring day. You’re probably fine for a couple of days — or even a week. But after a couple of months, the life you had come to enjoy will look very different. 

Some colleagues at my alma mater, Penn State, put together a sobering 4-minute video to help explain. Take a look if you have some time.

Special Report: NOAA and NWS Cuts

One final reminder: Don’t forget to set your clocks up this weekend, we shift to Daylight Saving Time during the predawn hours on Sunday morning.