Warm then Windy!

So I'm going to go completely scientific at this point, and explain one way meteorologists can tell when warmer weather is headed our way... This is a map of the heights, temperatures and winds currently at 850mb. The thick black lines are the lines of constant height, the thin lines with little barbs at the end are the wind barbs (each little barb represents 10kts and a half a barb is 5kts), the colors are the temperatures - the reds are the warm ones and the closer to blue... the colder the temps. One way we can tell warmer weather is on the way is when the wind barbs cross from a warmer color towards a colder color with the barb part sitting in the warmer colors. So as you can see in the circled area around SD, the wind barbs in the Western portion of the state are in the red/orange color and point towards a cooler color, in this case the tan color. Since that's going on, that means that warm air will be moving in that same direction, this is what we call "Warm Air Advection" (WAA) and in order for it to really warm things up, we see this similar pattern in several layers of the atmosphere, we usually check for WAA in the 700mb layer as well as in the 500mb layer, if all three layers have WAA present - you can definitely expect warmer weather!
Another thing you can tell by this map is there are more wind barbs on the Western half of the state and in Montana and Wyoming than there are on the Eastern half of the state, which also means that windier weather is heading towards our area for later Saturday afternoon and into Sunday.
Enjoy the "heat wave"!
~KDLT Meteorologist Jesse Ritka