There’s a pretty stark contrast in temperatures right at the state line early on this Friday morning. As of the 4:00am hour, temperatures across a large part of southern middle Tennessee are down into the mid 60s (a little milder in western areas), but everyone in northwest Alabama is still sitting in the low to even mid 70s! Conditions are quiet though, with barely any cloud cover across the area, and we are setting up for another pretty nice late August day across the Tennessee Valley.
Mostly sunny skies will continue for our Friday, but temperatures will be a little warmer than they had been for a large part of the week. We’re back into the lower 90s areawide by the afternoon for daytime highs. Fortunately, dewpoints are in the 60s; so, those 90s won’t feel too terrible. Weather looks nice for Week 1 kickoff of high school football across the area this evening! Mostly clear skies with temps in the low to mid 80s by kickoff and then dropping into the mid 70s by 4th quarter. With mostly clear skies, we continue to drop on down toward the mid to upper 60s for overnight lows.
The weekend is a bit warmer still, but weather looks nice overall. Skies will be mostly clear, and even though temperatures will be climbing closer to the mid 90s, humidity won’t be too excessive by late August standards. Mostly sunny to partly cloudy skies continue into a large part of next week as a big upper-level ridge of high pressure builds in across the region. The subsidence (sinking motion) from that, combined with the late August sun angle, means hot weather this time of year. We’re in the upper 90s as early as Monday, and triple digit heat makes a return Tuesday and Wednesday! Fortunately, dewpoints hang into the 60s, keeping heat index values closer to the air temperatures.
Dry weather continues through at least the middle of next week, with even isolated rain chances not returning to the forecast until Thursday at the earliest. This is not good news with the expanding and intensifying drought across the area. After almost completely removing drought conditions less than a month ago, things have trended much drier, and severe drought conditions are expanding across both southern Tennessee and northwest Alabama. Most of our area has rainfall deficits of 1 to 2 FEET from the last 365 days! We definitely need rain here across the Tennessee Valley.
The Atlantic basin continues to remain quiet. There is some minor and disorganized storminess across the Intertropical Convergence Zone, but nothing is trying to get its act together. There is bigger tropical wave activity over Africa, but wave activity has had a very hard time holding together after rolling offshore into the Atlantic. We’ll see how this goes, but nothing looks to imminently develop into an organized tropical system for at least the next seven days.
