First Warning Forecast | The Heat Continues...
...But Might Today Be An Ever-So-Slight Reprieve?
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) - The sauna-like feel this morning made the pea-soup fog a veritable steam bath of mugginess, but gradually sunshine will be working in from north to south as we get past lunchtime. Temperatures will be quickly rising to the 80s yet-again, but there is room to believe today will not end up being as hot as yesterday, if by only a couple degrees. A weak front has crossed the region, and as the air dries out behind it, we’ll be experiencing a northerly flow of air this afternoon. This applies a slight influence toward ‘pleasant’ skies, but I caution to say that we’ll still be quite warm and similar to yesterday’s weather. Is there much difference between 88° and 92°? With high humidity that slight difference becomes magnified, but we’ll be experiencing lowering humidity from this afternoon onward given these helpful northerly breezes. Once the sun sets, we’ll almost immediately sense this advantage, as temperatures will quickly work back through the 70s and even the 60s overnight. Tomorrow morning’s start will be much more comfortable than today.
The heat nevertheless continues on Wednesday. The ‘heat dome’ we’ve been talking about out west starts pushing eastward on us, putting us back around 90° in the afternoon under continued sunshine. With the hottest weather to our west and seasonably cool air to our east (many places in New England stay in the 70s), we’ll find ourselves in a middle-ground zone that’s ripe for unsettled weather. The latest modeling puts Thursday and Friday as our best bet to have to track plumes of thunderstorms making a run at us from the Great Lakes. It’s a sort of “Catch-22″, where staying dry means excessive heat in the mid-90s but any sort of relief in that department ends up coming with the heightened risk for strong or even severe storms. A final push of re-setting air arrives on Saturday, keeping up the threat of a stray shower or storm, but also seeing high temperatures back to the seasonable mid-80s. Indeed, once we can get to the other side of this particular heat wave, the extended forecast has us avoiding the 90s right through next week.
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