We continue to wake up to comfortable morning temperatures across the Tennessee Valley. We’re hanging out in the 60s across the area as of the 5:00am hour. High pressure is in firm control of the weather across our region, both at the surface, and aloft, and this means quiet weather is ahead for now.
Don’t let these nice temperatures this morning fool you though. We are going to be flat out hot by the afternoon! Mostly sunny skies, light winds, and that upper-level ridge parked over us all work together with the low humidity air that heats and cools more efficiently to get us up to the upper 90s and lower 100s this afternoon. No, those are not heat index values. Those are the air temperature highs. The drier air does mean that the heat index values will be closer to the temperatures and that your body can sweat and cool a bit more efficiently than it can with humid air in place, but it’s still going to be hot, regardless! Be sure to stay hydrated and take breaks in the shade or AC whenever you are able to do so. If you have to be outdoors for significant lengths of time or doing strenuous labor, try drinking a sports drink with electrolytes instead of just water.
Skies stay clear through tonight, and that allows temperatures to drop efficiently again. However, with a higher starting point from the afternoon, that means we’re a few degrees warmer overnight. Lows are expected to mainly be in the upper 60s to lower 70s. We’re at it with the heat again on Wednesday, and maybe even a couple degrees warmer than today for many areas. Daytime highs look to either be into the lower 100s or very close to it at 99 areawide. That includes us flirting very close to a record high being possible in the Shoals!
We’re still nearly as hot on Thursday, with highs in the upper 90s to lower 100s, but things gradually begin changing in the pattern. The upper-level ridge starts the very beginning of its weakening… not enough to relax the temperatures, but enough to allow the chance of a few isolated showers or thundershowers to develop in the afternoon. As we head into Friday and the Labor Day weekend, a surface front sags toward the area from the northwest as the upper-level ridge continues to weaken more significantly. This increases the chances of scattered showers and storms each day. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t look like a widespread heavy rainfall, but any increasing rain chances are welcome at this point. The general forecast rainfall totals from the NWS Weather Prediction Center are an areawide quarter to half inch between now and this time early next week. However, keep in mind that storms will be scattered and that rain coverage will be much more uneven than what is depicted by their larger scale smoothed out forecast values. The additional good news is that temperatures will start to relax. We start easing back into the mid to eventually lower 90s over the weekend, and we very well could slip back into the mid to upper 80s as we head into next week!
We’re watching the tropics closely as well. There’s nothing organized out there at the moment, but the National Hurricane Center has flagged a tropical wave for a 20% chance of slowly developing into an organized tropical system as we head through the Labor Day weekend and into next week. Models and ensembles overnight have backed off on being as aggressive with this as they had been on earlier data cycles. We will be watching to see if that is just a one-run fluke in the data, or if it is a trend toward things being less likely for development. Conditions to appear to gradually become more favorable for development as we head into early September though, regardless of what this particular wave does, and there is additional tropical wave activity over Africa that is waiting to move offshore. We will be watching things closely in the days and weeks ahead. The next name on the list is Francine, and the official statistical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season is still ahead of us, coming on September 10th… with the season officially running through the end of November.
