Today was yet another very warm, almost hot afternoon, with highs climbing into the upper 80°s for many WAFB neighborhoods. That makes six straight days with highs in the upper 80°s to low 90°s, and our forecast calls for two more for Thursday and Friday.
Thursday shapes up to be a near repeat of today (Wednesday), although maybe a couple of degrees warmer. For metro Baton Rouge, expect sunrise temps in the mid to upper 60°s with patchy morning fog and fair to partly cloudy afternoon skies with highs around 90°. And as we’ve seen a couple of the past days, a spotty shower or thunderstorm can’t be entirely ruled out, but the vast majority of us will stay dry.
For Friday, the day begins much the same, and highs will return to near 90° for Friday afternoon, but we’ll also add in a 20% chance of afternoon rain. So again, the vast majority of WAFB neighborhoods stay dry, but our Gulf humidity and a modest increase in atmospheric instability should allow for a few showers and rumbles of thunder across the viewing area.
Our forecast thinking has a quasi-stationary front aligned west-to-east across the eastern half of the nation. Along the trailing end of that frontal system, we expect a slow-moving cool front to begin moving from the Southern Plains into the lower Mississippi Valley on Friday, with the front sagging into northern Louisiana by Saturday morning. Rain chances will slowly but steadily increase from the latter half of the day on Friday into Saturday as that cool front approaches the WAFB viewing area.
But the front will be taking its time crossing the Bayou State, and that means “rain likely” for both Saturday and Sunday. In fact, the current NWS Hydrometeorological Prediction Center (HPC) surface chart for Sunday shows a center of low pressure developing over SW/SC Louisiana on Sunday. The front is expected to continue moving to the south and southeast and head out over the northern Gulf by Monday morning and then continue to move away from Louisiana into Tuesday.
The good news for the time being is that we are not especially concerned about widespread severe or active weather with this weekend’s frontal passage. The latest HPC rain projections call for something on the order of 1.0” to 1.5” of rain for the viewing area and little or no pending threat of a severe weather outbreak.
And in the tropics, only Nadine is earning any attention today, and ‘she’ sure seems committed to hanging around for a while. The latest NHC forecast keep Nadine at tropical-storm (TS) intensity into Monday. If Nadine does survive into Monday, that will make 20 days at TS strength or greater!
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