MSU Baseball Forecast: Headin’ on down to Baton Rouge
Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports
So for today’s MSU Baseball forecast, we will be looking down in Baton Rouge for our weekend series against the Bengal Tigers of Louisiana State University. The games, being played in Alex Box Stadium, have scheduled starts of 6:30 PM CDT for both the Friday and Saturday matchups and a 1:00 PM CDT first pitch for the closer on Sunday. So we will do our forecast period for the first pitch and the last out, or roughly a three hour period. I won’t overload you with too much weather nerdiness, but I will go into a little detail on what I’m seeing in the models and will explain it as simply as possible. So without further adieu, let’s jump right on in!
We will use the North American Mesoscale model, or as we fondly refer to it, the NAM. The website I will be using is http://www.twisterdata.com. Let’s begin at the 250 mb level where we are looking at the jet stream.
There is an area of faster winds approaching Baton Rouge over the day on Friday into Friday evening. Luckily for the game, Baton Rouge falls in what we call the right-front quadrant of the jet streak. This means that air should be sinking and inhibiting cloud growth. As you go through the model, the jet streak continues to propagate across the South. The track of the jet streak, however, puts Baton Rouge in the left-front quadrant of the jet streak which is an area of uplift. As we approach game time on Sunday, it seems that the energy is being split near the Baton Rouge area. This means that we most likely will have more downward motion than upward motion for the area.
Moving onto the 500 mb level where we will look for Positive Vorticity Advection, or PVA. Looking at this data, it seems that we are going to miss the PVA on Friday. We do have a good bit of PVA moving through on Friday morning and will be out in the afternoon. So Friday looks to be clear as far as precipitation is concerned, but we may still have some lingering clouds for the game, if everything holds out. Saturday, however, looks like it will be pretty good for clouds and maybe even some precipitation. Sunday isn’t bad, but it’s not necessarily great as far as baseball is concerned.
At 700 mb, we will look for Upward Vertical Velocities or UVVs for short. Just as I expected, there isn’t much vertical motion on Friday which will keep the clouds from developing too much over Baton Rouge. Saturday is once again our best time for weather and precipitation. Sunday may be a little tricky as we have some UVVs tracking just North of Baton Rouge. So it all depends on whether or not the track of the system stays like the model suggests or if it deviates to the South.
Numbers you want to know
Friday
First pitch (6:30 PM): 76 degrees, cloudy, winds from the North at 5-10 mph. Chance of rain: 10%
Last out (9:30 PM): 69 degrees, cloudy, winds from the N at 5 mph. Chance of rain: 10%
Saturday
First pitch (6:30 PM): 70 degrees, thunderstorms in the vicinity, winds from the East at 5-10 mph. Chance of rain: 80%. Chance of rain/lighting delays: 100%.
Last out maybe (9:30 PM): 64 degrees, thunderstorms in vicinity, winds from the East at 5-10 mph. Chance of rain: 60%. Chance of finishing the game: 60%.
Sunday
First pitch (1:00 PM): 73 degrees, cloudy, winds from the South at 5-10 mph. Chance of rain: 70%.
Last out (4:00 PM): 73 degrees, cloudy, winds from the South at 5-10 mph. Chance of rain: 80%.