textproduct: Lubbock

KEY MESSAGES

Issued at 1117 PM CST Tue Jan 6 2026

- Rain likely late tonight through early Thursday morning.

- Possible wintry precipitation Friday morning, mainly over the far SW Panhandle.

- Cooler and dry through the weekend.

SHORT TERM

(Tonight through Thursday) Issued at 1117 PM CST Tue Jan 6 2026

A quiet overnight is expected with calm winds, although higher cloud cover will keep morning lows moderated generally in the mid 30s to low 40s. The forecast for today and Thursday remains mostly unchanged from the previous. Weak upper ridging and breezy SW surface flow will bring another day of significantly above average temperatures with highs in the 70s. Cloud cover will increase as a trough approaches from the Desert Southwest during the afternoon hours. A fetch of southwesterly moisture advection downstream of its axis along with favorable forcing parameters from relatively strong upper and low-level jets continues to yield fairly high confidence for rainfall. Steering flow remains tightly packed behind the QPF and it will move west to east across the region fairly quickly, likely completely moving out by mid Thursday morning. A few thuderstorms cannot be ruled out, mainly across the southern Rolling Plains where NAM MUCAPE values are currently approaching 1000 J/kg. However, much of this CAPE will be "skinny" and remain above 700 mb. Wind speeds above that level will be anywhere between 50-100 kts and thus the CAPE/shear ratio is unfavorable for any sort of severe weather. Soundings are also quite saturated. The aforementioned stronger winds aloft at all levels should in part mix down to the surface and very breezy westerly winds remain expected. At this time, they remain below advisory criteria, however gusts to 40 mph are possible. This will lead to one more day this week of above average temperatures for the area, ranging from the low 60s over the far SW Panhandle to the low 70s off the Caprock.

LONG TERM

(Thursday night through next Tuesday) Issued at 1117 PM CST Tue Jan 6 2026

A secondary, positively tilted trough will approach Thursday evening. A closed low looks to develop over northern NM before the entire system tracks to the northeast. The associated weak surface low will become more vertically stacked during this progression and much of the precipitation (and possibly deformation banding) would be expected on its north and west sides, in this case occurring primarily over the northern and central TX Panhandles. Also as the low will be cutoff from the main flow by early Friday morning, there will be nothing preventing it from tracking farther north whereas the split more compact flow to the south appears to not be going anywhere. Most synoptic models including GFS/ECMWF/UKMET concur with this thinking. Ensembles have also shifted QPF slightly northward with only the southern fringes clipping the far SW Texas Panhandle. NAM is an outlier bringing more precipitation to the south, however it is only the second run going out to that time frame and will likely conform with other aforementioned guidance in subsequent runs. Latest NBM PoPs lagged a bit and are still catching up to latest guidance trends. As such, they have been slightly trimmed although chances have been retained in the far SW Panhandle. At least in the early Friday morning timeframe, wet bulb temperatures only drop below freezing for a short time. Particularly as well, if NBM winds remain westerly at 10-15 mph in this area as currently indicated, the surface temperatures will have a difficult time dropping below freezing and may run higher than guidance indicates. That all said, any freezing precipitation that does find its way into this area will be short lived and not have much time to accumulate any.

Winds will gradually veer northward through the day Friday behind the strong trailing surface cold front. Again PoPs have been retained over the far southern Panhandle through the afternoon, but trends are more pessimistic. Winds will be breezy sustained at 20-25 mph and finally bring high temperatures back towards seasonal averages into the 50s. Surface high pressure will allow for continued relatively cooler and benign conditions through the weekend and into early next week.

AVIATION

(06Z TAFS) Issued at 1117 PM CST Tue Jan 6 2026

VFR will likely continue through the TAF period. An upper level storm system will approach the region on Wednesday bringing breezy southwest winds during the Wednesday afternoon hours.

LUB WATCHES/WARNINGS/ADVISORIES

None.