Yesterday we had a technical high of 60 degrees, but that was just after midnight. We actually ended up in the 40s during the afternoon. It was chilly, but it was dry. We have been on a roller coaster ride for temperatures over the last 2 weeks. There were a few days that were well above average, but there were also a couple of days that were well below average.
Today a strong cold front is stalling out far to our south. High pressure is overhead.
We will have a lot of sunshine with a light southwest wind. This will push the temperatures up into the mid 50s this afternoon.
We might even hit the upper 50s. This is a big rise in temps from the morning lows. We’ve had this effect a lot this Fall. When you have very dry air, then you don’t have to add as much heat to raise the temperature compared to a more humid air mass. So more energy from the sun goes into heating the air, and less goes into drying out the air. Think of a dessert versus a rainforest. You get huge swings in temperatures from day-to-night in the dessert, but much less of a change in the rainforest. With the strong sunshine today and light southwest winds temps will rise about 20-30 degrees this afternoon. As you can see from the map above there will be more heating in the central U.S. today. In fact they will likely be breaking records out there over the next couple of days. They will be in the 70s and 80s over parts of the Deep South and central U.S. again tomorrow into Wednesday.
We’ll be in the upper 50s tomorrow. Then we’ll be near 60 degrees on Wednesday. That won’t be much different from the Temps in Illinois and Minnesota. Course they will be challenging records out there. The warmth will slide east by late week. High temps will be in the upper 60s Thursday and Friday. We might even hit a few 70s. We’ll still be in the 60s on Saturday.
We’ll be dry for a while. We will continue to add to the rainfall deficit for the month and the year. We are currently 0.48″ below the average rainfall for the month. We are down about 9″ (that’s nine inches) for the year so far. I really doubt we’ll get caught up in the next couple of weeks before the year ends.
There will be some isolated showers late Friday. Then we’ll have some scattered rain showers on Saturday. I’ll have more on next weekend’s forecast in tomorrow’s weather blog.
Meteorologist: Jeremy Wheeler