Showers and storms won’t be quite nearly as numerous today as they were on Tuesday, but they will still be out there. We’re starting off mostly cloudy to partly sunny on this Wednesday morning with lower 70s and upper 60s. Partly sunny skies will allow us to warm into the upper 80s to lower 90s by the afternoon, and a few isolated to widely scattered showers and storms will be possible. These will hang on into the early/mid evening before the loss of daytime heating allows them to diminish. During the late overnight and into early Thursday morning, we will have a weakening batch of showers and storms move in from the northwest. The one thing this run of the Futurecast model may be handling incorrectly is that they may hang together on through the morning and midday. If that happens, afternoon temperatures may stay into the low to mid 80s with any scattered afternoon and evening showers and storms behind the morning stuff being more much isolated. Regardless, things quiet down later into the overnight with the loss of daytime heating.
We finally start to break the seemingly endless rainy pattern as we head into Friday and Saturday with rain chances mainly shifting off to our south and west. As we head into Sunday and early next week, even though shower and storm chances shift back into the area, we are still only talking about very isolated pop-up type stuff that is much more typical of what you’d expect during the summer.
The pattern change is going to be driven by a big upper-level ridge of high pressure that situates itself over the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys this weekend into early next week. Daytime highs will climb into the low to mid 90s from Friday right on into next week. And since we’re not getting rid of the low to mid 70 dewpoints anytime soon for at least the next seven days, that’s going to mean heat index values climb into the 100+ range by the weekend and early next week… and maybe even a little higher than what you see here on the chart. These are raw NWS forecast numbers that often skew a little on the low side compared to what actually ends up verifying. Heat index values could easily climb into the 102 to 106 range as we head into Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday… if not Saturday as well. This is right on time, as the first official day of summer is this Friday!
