Good Friday, everyone. It’s a big weekend in the bluegrass state with the combination of Labor Day and Kentucky Derby Day. This rare combo is beginning with some flat out awesome fall weather today and this continues through much of the weekend. In the longer term, we find a slow-moving fall storm system rolling our way next week. The arrival time of that system continues to really slow down and that leads to some change.

Let’s kick things off with what’s going on out there today. A cold front drops southward through the state early on and this may still spit out some showers and storms, especially in the south and southeast. Here are your radars…

Cooler and drier air settles in quickly behind the front with afternoon highs mainly mid and upper 70s with low humidity. The south may briefly spike a bit with the later arrival of the front. Similar highs will be noted for Derby Day on Saturday. With calm winds and low humidity levels, overnight lows may reach the upper 40s in a few spots by tomorrow morning.

The setup for next week continues to feature one anomalous surge of cold air coming into the Rockies and the middle part of the country. This turns into a cutoff low pressure and that means this thing will be painfully slow to work to the east. You can see what I’m talking about…

That slower arrival means a longer duration of temps spiking next week. Instead of a cooler than normal week, it’s likely to now be normal or a little above normal until that arrives late week. It also means rounds of rain and thunderstorms may become more common…

Just how extreme is this setup pushing into the country in the coming days? We don’t normally talk a lot about other parts of the country, but this one is deserving. Let’s take a little trip to Colorado to be in the line of fire for some truly staggering changes. Here are the forecast highs for this Sunday…

Those are temps in the 90s with some low 100s showing up near Denver and across the southeastern corner of the state. Areas of western Kansas are 100+ as well.

Let’s fast forward to Tuesday night’s low temps…

That may be one of the most crazy things I’ve ever seen. The state of Colorado may feature temps of 104 and -1 in just a little more than two days. But, it doesn’t stop there. Tell them what else they’ve won, CB. It’s an early September snowstorm…

Double WOW! That has snow into the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas in early September!!!

I’m looking into past September snows in Denver to see if they have anything in common (they do) and if we can find any kind of correlation to the following winters around here. I will share that with you with a post this weekend.

I plan to update things later today, so check back. Have a good one and take care.