Tropical Storm Bertha formed yesterday off of the South Carolina coast. It quickly moved inland and weakened as forecast. It snaked its way north over western North Carolina and western Virginia. Now it has fallen apart over the Appalachian Mountains.
However, there was a lot of tropical moisture coming up from the south since yesterday. It has poured into our region. Dew points are now in the 60s and 70s. That’s the highest it’s been in a while. While Bertha has become a weak area of low pressure, there is another area of low pressure back over Tennessee.
That system will slowly move east over the next couple of days. It will keep our rain chances up through Saturday. We already had scattered showers this morning with a few heavy downpours. We’ll have scattered showers on-and-off through the day. With the higher heat and humidity today we’ll also develop some scattered thunderstorms during the afternoon.
There will be a few downpours and some of the winds will be gusty. The general wind will be out of the south at 10-15mph with gusts to 25ph. This will push the high temperatures up into the low-mid 80s despite the clouds and rain.
With the second system moving in over the next 2-3 days we’ll have similar weather for Friday and Saturday. Lots of clouds, scattered showers, and some thunderstorms in the afternoons. High temps will be in the 80s. We haven’t had much rain up to this point. It’s been about a quarter to a half an inch so far.
However, we’ll see a good bit of rain going forward. Amounts will vary widely. We could see anywhere from 0.5″ up to 2.5″ between today and Saturday.
On Sunday everything changes. We’ll have a cold front move through Saturday night. This will dry us out and cool us down by Sunday morning. Humidity levels will drop for a while too.
This will create some great weather from Sunday through Wednesday of next week. We’ll be dry with highs in the 70s. Some rain looks to return later next week, but we’ll post more about that over the next couple of days.
We did have a long stretch of cool weather in May. Other parts of the country were much warmer. But there’s one area on the planet that was very hot by their standards. Siberia! There has been record heat in that region and other parts of Russia this year. They also had a lot of unusual heat there over the last couple of years. This year it is causing wildfires to burn. Here is the article with more specific information: Siberian heat.
Meteorologist: Jeremy Wheeler
