Our cold front slowed in its eastward progress significantly over the weekend, and that is not a good thing for us this morning. If you are needing a silver lining, it would be that we were able to squeeze a completely dry day yesterday since the front slowed, and harvest rolled on without a hitch. However, a stronger front brings more rain potential, something that we will see manifest today. Today we have rains lasting for a longer period, and we have to bump our rain totals higher now since the front has been able to pick up more moisture. Right now we are putting rain totals at .5?-1.5? over nearly all of the state. Thunderstorms are what we need to watch today, as they would really have the ability to bump totals up quickly. At this point, the thunderstorms seem to be more of an issue farther west, over Indiana, rather than here. We look for just a long, drawn out rain event going through tonight and ending early tomorrow morning. The map above shows the potential rain totals cumulative through tomorrow morning.
Behind the front we are in for a cooler, damp and cloudy pattern around, a consequence of such the dramatic chance from very warm air to more seasonable air. Remember, cooler air cannot hold nearly as much moisture as warm, so even though we are not looking for any new precipitation, this atmospheric set up, with the temperature change, will lead to a lot of clouds, a few spits and sprinkles and generally, very little drying through midweek. The coldest part of the incoming air mass will be over us on Wednesday. The gray, cool, damp set up holds through the end of Wednesday.
By Thursday we should get sunshine back and have some slight bump in temperature. However, warming will be only slight. Sun holds through Friday, but our next front rolls in on Saturday. That front does not have much moisture with it at all, but does bring yet another colder air mass change to the region. We will keep an eye out for rains of .1?-.4? over about 70% of the state from late morning Saturday through early Sunday morning. A bigger story may be the fact that we will likely see a good hard frost to finish next weekend. Morning lows will bottom out at or below freezing over at least two thirds of the state. This will be first hard frost over the area, but likely does not make it to the level of hard freeze (several hours in the upper 20s) just yet. The map above shows potential morning lows Monday morning (Sunday night lows).
The rest of next week looks dry, Monday through Friday. Late in the week we may have to tweak the forecast to allow a few scattered showers to rotate through, offshoots of a stronger disturbance passing bay well to the north over the heart of the Great Lakes. Right now things don?t look all that impressive. However, later in the extended window, we have a powerful storm moving in for the 5th and lingering into the 6th. The system has rain potential up to 1 inch of liquid. Temperatures still are above normal, slightly, so we expect rain. But, the circulation is looking to pull down some pretty cold air behind it. That may be where we see our first good hard freeze over a large part of the state.
