As a few engineers mentioned, there is a light shower heading in the direction of the track.
I’m actually not sure it will even hit the track. On its current trajectory it will miss to the South by about 5km. It could drift a bit more towards the track, I’ll keep you all updated. If it does hit the track, it will reach in about 15-20 minutes, or around lap 25. It will be very short lived, less than 5 laps, but it could be intense by F1 standards.
A small shower is currently located around 35km from the track. On its current heading it will pass about 5km North of the track. It is small and weak, unlikely to impact the race, but some light spots in the edge cannot be ruled out.
Zooming out, there are large areas of rain to the North and South, both of which will safely miss the track. There is currently a large gap directly upwind of the track; this is the area to watch for new popup showers during the race.
As it stands, the race will proceed dry. Moving the start time up seem to have avoided the mess that is coming from a few hours offshore .
Hello all! As promised, I'm back with a full forecast update for the race tomorrow. This was a much more difficult forecast than I was expecting; the good news is that the chance for a complete washout gradually dropped away the last few days, but the bad news is that means predicting any small showers much more difficult. My general thinking is that rain will be a bit more widespread than the model images I show in the slides above, but still not widespread enough to completely stop the race.
I really hope that last line on slide 6 doesn't age poorly, but unless this is a catastrophic miss by the weather models I simply cannot see a complete washout happening at this point, especially with the earlier start. The washout will come for Miami, but only later in the afternoon/evening.
As always during rain races, I will be back tomorrow in the pre-race and race discussion sticky threads with live updates on the radar.
EDIT: I forgot to update the Fahrenheit conversion for the temperature on Sunday, it should read 79º to 84ºF.
F1 is finally back, and I'm back with a weather forecast, which unfortunately means some interesting weather is expected this weekend. Now that we're within 48 hours of FP1, we can take an early look at the forecast, which I'm calling a "preview".
Friday and Saturday should be fine, but there is a real threat of heavy rainfall and/or thunderstorms at least on and off on Sunday. We are still five days out, and so a lot can and will change, but we are currently looking at a growing model consensus at a cold front bringing stormy weather on Sunday. The ECMWF/European model is in particular intense, showing a heavy thunderstorm dropping nearly 1 inch (2.5 cm) of rainfall in the three-hour span that the race falls into. Other models are thankfully less intense.
We are not yet in range of the high-resolution mesoscale models, which can actually model thunderstorms, but we should be by Friday. I'll be back on Friday morning with a full weekend forecast update, and possibly again on Sunday morning for a race-specific outlook.
Finally, I hate to mention this coming off of a month break and two cancellations, but I need to note that most U.S. sporting events are required by contract with workers, the event space, and local government to have plans for lightning in place. I could not find the specific policy for Hard Rock Stadium, but the Miami GP website lists the following:
"When lightning is detected in close proximity of the Miami International Autodrome, the public address system will inform guests where to seek shelter. The event will be suspended if there is an imminent threat."
My understanding is many outdoor U.S. sporting events have a "lightning clock", where any lightning strike or thunder heard within a certain radius of the location (ex: 10 miles) immediately starts a 30 minute countdown, during which the event is suspended and fans/employees are instructed to seek shelter. Every subsequent thunder heard resets that timer, until 30 minutes have passed since the last thunder was heard, after which the event may resume. This does not give a lot of leeway for F1, especially if the storms are slow-moving as they likely will be with a cold front transitioning to stationary. The best hope is that the front and any associated storms fully clear the track by the afternoon, or that they remain heavy showers with no lightning.