Good Thursday, folks. It’s another warm and windy day, but massive weather changes are blowing in for the Memorial Day Weekend. Rounds of showers and thunderstorms are leading the charge and some of these could be strong or severe late today into Friday. Beyond that… It’s chilly.
Isolated showers and storms will be around today as temps hit the 80s. Southwest winds will be gusty ahead of a storm system moving in from the west. As this storm gets closer, it will bring clusters of thunderstorms into western Kentucky late this afternoon and evening. This is where we will be looking at the greatest severe weather threat through the evening…
That threat focuses farther east overnight and Friday as the low works through the Ohio Valley…
High winds and hail are the main threats through Friday.
Once the low slides to our east, much cooler winds blow from the north and northeast as low clouds and isolated showers linger into Saturday. This is a highly anomalous setup and it has the NAM forecasting 850mb temps at or below 0 Celsius in our region…
I’ve never seen a model forecast that before for this late in spring.
These same models continue to run with the potential for record low high temps on Saturday…
GFS
Canadian
The NAM is even colder..
Obviously, that’s not going to verify, but it’s crazy to even see this time of year.
Temps on Sunday range from the middle 60s to lower 70s then reach the mid 70s to around 80 for Memorial Day. Showers and storms then look to return and may hang tough into next week as a slow-moving system spins through…
That would keep our temps way down for the first week of June.
I will update if need be later today. Until then, you are all set to track some late Thursday thunder…
Current watches
Possible Watch Areas
Make it a terrific Thursday and take care.
Anomalous indeed…to see the 850mb 0°C line cross our region during the last week of May, is absolutely nuts! Climate models continue to take a beating as their algorithms wrestle with jet stream winds positioned where they simple should NOT be, at this point in time. We’ll probably continue to see wide extremes in temperature for the foreseeable future, while the absence of what we would expect to see in accompanying severe weather, remains a real puzzler.
Wednesday morning, O’Hare Airport in Chicago had its heaviest rainfall of the year with 0.74 inches, bringing the monthly total there to 1.26 inches. In the SW Suburbs at the NWS Forecast Office, 0.50 inches fell, bringing the monthly total to 3.44 inches.
Our seven-day streak of 80+ degree days will come crashing to an end today and will remain very cool through the weekend with strong NE winds blowing off Lake Michigan. A soaking rain is forecast for the entire Metro Area later today through Friday morning, but any possible severe weather will be well downstate.