Each day this week more and more people will be traveling for the holidays. Some folks are going to get a head start and begin to travel today. Luckily, we will have some good weather for travel in the region.
The travel weather will be pretty good for a lot of the U.S. today too. However, there will be some scattered rain showers over the Tennessee River Valley up into the Great Lakes. There will also be some more rain and snow over parts of the west.
As far as weather features, we have high pressure to our south today. There is a cold front over the Midwest.
We’ll have lots of sunshine in the area all day with a few thin clouds in the afternoon. There will be a light south wind. So temps will warm fast. We started in the 30s and 40s this morning. We’ll end in the mid-upper 60s this afternoon.
Tomorrow the front will be approaching from the west. Moisture will increase ahead of it. We’ll have lots of clouds through the day with some scattered rain showers between the late morning and the early afternoon.
High temps will make it into the mid 60s before the front arrives. Then temps will fall to the 50s late in the day.
Winds will pick up out of the northwest. We won’t get much rainfall. It will likely only be one or two hundredths of an inch.
We’ll be dry and cool on Wednesday. Highs will be in the upper 50s. It will be good weather for travel in our region. However, there will be some rain over the central U.S.
By Thursday we’ll have a big push of moisture into the region. We’ll be mostly cloudy or cloudy all day. There will be some scattered showers in the morning.
Then we’ll have some more rain on-and-off through the day.
I don’t know if the day will be a complete washout yet, but there is about a 70-80% chance for rain, and it will likely impact travel.
Friday’s forecast is tricky in terms of precip timing. The GFS has some rain in the morning, but the Euro breaks up the rain in the morning. It then has a few showers returning in the afternoon. I’ll talk about it some more in tomorrow’s weather blog. Hopefully, the models will come into more agreement by then. One thing they are already agreeing on is that some much colder air will arrive by next weekend. Highs temps will only be in the…….. (drumroll)……… 40s.
Before I go I do want to talk about climate. Last night meteorologist Don Slater showed the climate for the month. It was very interesting. We have had some rain, but we do need some more. We are down about 1 inch below average.
However, the temperatures are what shocked me. We had a lot of 70s and 80s for the first half of the month. So far we are over 6 degrees above average.
That’s a big number when you are talking about an average. Sure we had a couple of cool days, but most of the month has been mild.
It is quiet in the tropics, and it should stay that way for at least a little while.
Meteorologist: Jeremy Wheeler