Good Thursday everyone. We will see a very nice little break from the heat and humidity on this Thursday. It will be a one and done break as the sultry temps work back in for the weekend and look to hang tough into next week. There will be some bouncing around of temps during this time and this may lead us toward a stormy mid month pattern.
In the short term… drier and cooler air will be on the menu for today. That is all relative to the heat and humidity of late as temps today should still come out just a bit above normal with highs in the low and mid 80s.
Current Temps
The humidity levels will be MUCH lower giving our comfort index a boost in the arm. Mostly Sunny skies will dominate the day and that should carry us into Friday and much of the weekend.
Too bad the pleasant air won’t stick around. The heat and humidity will surge back in on Friday and really ramp up Saturday. Check out the high temp forecast off the GFS…
Add a big time increase in the muggies and you can get a “feels like” temp into the upper 90s to near 100 on Saturday.
A weak front will dive in from the northwest later Sunday into Monday and this will push the hot weather to our west and south for a day or so. This may also give us a shot at some scattered thunderstorms. The hot weather then makes a return into the middle of next week…
Through this whole thing you can see we are really only on the cusp of the MAJOR heat that resides across the deep south into the southern plains. That is the area where the ground is baked and is where the heat core will hang out this summer. The intrusions of weak fronts over the next week is the pattern telling us the heat ridge is not going to fully build into the Ohio Valley this summer.
Sure we will get in on the cusp of the heat from time to time… but the active pattern of the spring is showing signs of cranking back up by the middle and end of the month. This will likely force the ridge farther west and southwest in time as troughs dig into the Great Lakes and northeast. This setup usually puts our region into the mix for rounds of thunderstorms moving in from the northwest. You can see that on the rainfall forecast from the GFS over the next few weeks…
Regardless… the next week or two will be hot much of the time around here.
We also like to focus on the tropics from time to time and the Atlantic Hurricane Season is now off and running. Right on cue we have a system rolling across Florida into the Gulf of Mexico that will need to be watched. This thing actually started in IOWA over the weekend as a huge cluster of thunderstorms that rolled eastward off the mid atlantic states. It cranked back up over the warm western Atlantic waters as the flow carried it southwest toward Florida. This is a really cool scenario playing out with this system.
The models also continue to point toward the Caribbean for something to try to develop over the next week to 10 days. The Canadian model loves to blow up storms and is doing the same with whatever forms out of this mess next week…
We leave you with news of another major tornado outbreak… this time in Massachusetts of all places. This deadly outbreak swept across the northeast Wednesday afternoon and evening. Here is some MUST SEE tornado video from near Springfield, Mass…
Have a great Thursday and take care.
Just out of curiosity, at what latitude does one have to be for the sun NOT to be baking the ground?
I’m not sure on that, but each summer I start thinking about how nice Seattle or Vancouver would be to move to… Cool summers, mild winters(but not as warm as North FL winter).
See that the heat is really in the Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi area. Even Texas and some of the southwest seems to not be feeling this heat as much.
So what effect would a tropical storm have on these hot areas. By wetting the ground that should help knock some of the heat off. That in turn should effect us. Will be interesting to see what happens.
There isn’t a definitive answer here. But in the LEX area, in June we are only about 1,000 miles away from being DIRECTLY under the sun at peak heating. Obviously, the farther south you go toward Florida, the more directly under the sun you are. That’s why the sun will bake everything including your skin FAST in Summer here.
It feels great outside today! The lower humidity levels feel wonderful. Pretty much a perfect day outisde. We hit the pool yesterday and boy, was the water ever warm. This heat we have had really warmed the water up nicely.
Marie
I agree it was better than it has been the last couple of days, but I still had the AC on. About ten degrees cooler than today would have been perfect..I hate anything above 80