We continue with mostly clear skies across the Tennessee Valley and much of the Southeast early in this Tuesday morning. That is because of the drier air mass that has worked its way into the region behind the cold front that came through Sunday, now located down along the Gulf Coast. Behind the front, temperatures are in the mid 60s to lower 70s across the region early this morning, with a couple more hours left for them to drop before sunrise. Most of our viewing area across southern middle Tennessee, northwest Alabama, and northeast Mississippi will ease down into the low to mid 60s by sunrise, and some of our sheltered valley areas of middle Tennessee might try to briefly flirt with 58 or 59 this morning!
Today is setting up to be another beautiful day across the area, especially by late mid/late August standards! We expect mostly sunny skies and low humidity across the area, with daytime highs this afternoon topping out mainly in the mid 80s… although a few spots in northwest Alabama might make a run for the upper 80s. As we head into tonight, with the drier air mass firmly in place and clear skies continuing, we will be even cooler than this morning by several degrees. We expect everyone to slide down into the mid to upper 50s across the area by daybreak.
Of course, it’s still August around here, and y’all know we don’t do comfortable temps and fall-preview type weather for long! We’ll start sneaking toward the upper 80s and lower 90s heading closer to the weekend… and then we’re right back into the low and eventually middle 90s as we head into next week. The weather pattern looks to remain quiet for the next several days. Mostly sunny today, a bit more in the way of a few passing clouds on Wednesday, and a passing disturbance to our southeast on Thursday into Friday may also lead to a few more clouds. We’ve added a 10% chance of a stray shower or two on Thursday specifically for our north Alabama counties near I-65. We expect the bulk of the shower activity to miss us off to the southeast, but areas like Athens, Decatur, Hartselle, etc., might be close enough to have a slim chance of being grazed by a shower. Elsewhere across our area though, we expect it to be dry.
That dry weather looks to continue on through the weekend, before we finally maybe start to reintroduce the chance of an isolated shower or thunderstorm during the afternoon hours as we head into next week. We still don’t see any signs of appreciable rainfall, however. In fact, the NWS Weather Prediction Center’s rainfall forecast across the area for the next 7 days isn’t registering anything at all. This is not good news for farmers and for what has become worsening wildfire conditions with time across the area. While we may start to see a few showers return next week, the below average rainfall looks to stick around into at least the start of September if the latest precipitation outlooks from the NWS Climate Prediction Center. Once we get past this week, that also looks to be coupled with above average temperatures (likely highs in the mid to upper 90s) once again. While that is above our seasonal norm for this time of year by a few degrees, we’re certainly no stranger to the 90s (or warmer) right on deep into September many years around here.
Meanwhile, the tropics are returning to quiet for the time being with Ernesto moving out and off the board. We have some very weak, unorganized areas of disturbed weather along the Intertropical Convergence Zone in the open Atlantic, but nothing of consequence. There is some more organized looking tropical wave activity over western Africa at the moment, but nothing sticks out in the models as having a significant chance of developing anytime really soon. The latest 7-day outlook from the National Hurricane Center calls for no expected areas of development in the Atlantic basin. We are quickly approaching the climatological peak of the hurricane season though, and we very often see activity ramp up as we head into September. We’ll see how long the overall quiet lasts, but we will enjoy it while we have it!
