Breezy & Warm on Thursday

By Jay Grymes & Steve Caparotta

WAFB Storm Team QuickCast:

- another nice spring day for Thursday
- isolated afternoon showers for Friday, Saturday & Sunday
- bigger weather threat by late Monday

The forecast for the rest of the week is holding together as expected, with a good-looking spring day today and another on the way for tomorrow. We'll keep patchy fog in the Thursday morning forecast, with another mostly-sunny to partly-cloudy afternoon on the way as highs return to the low to mid 80°s for just about all WAFB communities.

Weekend Outlook

Our forecast for Friday through Sunday remains the same too: morning starts in the mid to upper 60°s with patchy fog around sunrise and highs in the mid 80°s with isolated afternoon showers. With rain chances for each of those days at only 20% or so, it means that most neighborhoods will stay dry each afternoon and even the rains that do develop will likely be short-lived. All looks pretty good for downtown Baton Rouge's Earth Day festivities on Sunday.

As we showed you yesterday, a warm front will continue it's northward drift through the state tonight and tomorrow. The front won't have enough energy or upper-level support to do much more than generate some fair-weather clouds, but it will signal a slow-steady increase in low-level moisture (rising dew points) that will mean warmer-than-normal mornings in the 60°s and provide the main ingredient for each morning's patchy fog. Still, dew points in the 60°s are not truly "uncomfortable," so while the next few afternoons will be warm, they should be nice days for some time outside.

While all will be relatively quiet here through the weekend, we will be watching some more active weather to our northwest and north over the next five days. The good news is that everything points to this week's active-to-severe weather remaining to our north and west through Sunday. Even some north Louisiana parishes may get in on some regionally-active weather tomorrow, but southern Louisiana and SW Mississippi should stay in the clear.

More Active by Early Next Week

Early next week, however, looks like a different story. 

Models continue to show a fairly potent frontal system moving into the central Gulf Coast region on a late-Monday to early-Tuesday time frame. Storms associated with the system will be developing over the Central and Southern Plains during the weekend as it marches east. A preliminary assessment by the NWS Storm Prediction Center already has much of the WAFB viewing area posted with at least a 30% chance of severe thunderstorms as the cold front moves through. 

We'll be keeping a close eye on further developments in the coming days, remembering that this is the 'heart' of severe weather season for our region.

But for the time being, let's just smile at the good spring weather as most of our kids enjoy their spring break from school.