Warming Up

A brief taste of cooler weather we enjoyed this weekend into Monday morning will quickly come to an end over the next 24 hours. Tuesday will provide another comfortably cool start in the upper 40°s, but afternoon highs will again reach the mid to upper 70°s under mostly sunny skies.

Strengthening southerly winds will result in milder mornings and a continuation of warm afternoons through the remainder of the week. Those southerly winds will also pump more moisture (humidity) into the area in the coming days, adding a ‘mugginess’ factor as the week wears on.

The next couple of days should remain dry, but a few showers are possible by Thursday afternoon and evening as our next storm system approaches from the west. The extended outlook features the potential for a somewhat prolonged run of unsettled weather as a cool front possibly stalls nearby into the weekend.

Titan9 RPM model projection for 7 a.m. on Thursday. The cool front seen out to our west will likely stall nearby into the weekend, resulting in a stretch of unsettled weather.

For now, we’ll call for fairly high rain chances beginning on Friday and continuing through the weekend, but there is some potential for the more significant rains to stay just to our west on Friday and Saturday. The location of the most significant rains will be highly dependent on where the front stalls, so we’ll continue to examine that and update our forecast over the next couple of days.

The 5-day rainfall outlook from NOAA’s HPC (Hydrometeorological Prediction Center) also supports the idea of significant rains staying to our west through at least Friday, with their projections showing most of the area receiving around a half-inch or less of rainfall through Saturday morning:

While we will be watching out for some rain later this week, the good news is that there appears to be little threat of significant severe weather anywhere across the U.S. That's a welcome change following a pair of dealy tornado outbreaks last week.

The graphic below shows the number of confirmed tornadoes so far in each state from Friday and the number of fatalities in green. Unofficially, it looks like we're at 49 confirmed tornadoes so far for Friday. The record for a single day in March is 59 and that could easily be surpassed in the coming days as the National Weather Service continues to finalize damage surveys.

Number of confirmed tornadoes in each state (number superimposed on tornado symbol) and fatalities (in green) from March 2, 2012 storms.