Steve signing in at 8:21 AM. Mainly clear skies this morning with patchy fog. It is warm and muggy with temperatures ranging from 67° at Brindletown to 74° at Hickory. Expect today to be very hot with sunny skies and relative humidity values in the mid 40s this afternoon. It will feel pretty uncomfortable. Isolated thunderstorms are possible late this afternoon, especially in the eastern (Hickory) parts of the 4-county area but overall chances are pretty low. I think there is a slightly greater chance of storms later this evening area-wide with the most concentrated activity possible in northern Caldwell, NW Burke and NW McDowell. Storms later this afternoon are likely to develop over southern Ohio, eastern KY and western West Virginia with a complex of storms taking shape in the vicinity of Huntington WV and dropping southward. This area could expand westward into eastern Kentucky, eventually southwest Virginia and northeastern Tennessee later in the evening. It is possible the storms could move into western North Carolina also, say, around 11:00 PM to midnight. If that occurs, a few of these storms could contain damaging winds and hail, along with frequent lightning and heavy rains. Saturday may not be quite as warm as today but it will be even more humid with greater cloud cover. Another area of organized thunderstorms could take a swipe at our area during the afternoon. In the meantime, a back-door cold front will be moving slowly through eastern and central North Carolina and possibly settle somewhere along the I-85 corridor Saturday night. This front could make it all the way through North Carolina some time Sunday. In the meantime, we should see slightly cooler temperatures Sunday, potentially unsettled conditions with scattered showers and thunderstorms. The drier and cooler air probably doesnt make it into the 4-county area until Monday when afternoon temperatures with humidity in the 30-percent range should top out in the lower 80s. We should see dry and pleasant weather for the first half of next week. In the meantime a tropical system is trying to organize in the vicinity of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. I dont think its going to become a depression until it clears the Greater Antilles and moves into the Bahama Island chain, possibly Sunday. This will be a tricky system to forecast. Heres why: the high pressure that is forecast to bring us cooler and drier weather next week is likely to be sitting off the New England coast. Some of the hurricane models are getting the idea that this high may actually block the tropical systems recurvature out to sea and instead steer it toward the mid-Atlantic Coast. The HWRF (hurricane model) has a particularly ominous track, bringing this system within about 100 miles of the Florida east coast. It is something to watch at the moment but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, none the least of which are where will it eventually go and how strong will it get. Only a few models are forecasting it to reach hurricane status at this point.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 12:43:26 +0000
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