Monday 8/6 Update

Hope you were able to pick up a little rain over the weekend.  Those rain chances I was advertising last week in these blog updates did manage to pan out...but as was also expected, showers/storms were widely scattered, meaning a lucky few got a nice soaking, while many of us got just enough to dirty up the car.  At least we're getting to enjoy some slightly lower humidity, which will stick around for another day or two.  Not much of a cool down today like we'd hoped for....our high was 96, a function of very low humidity and plentiful sunshine.  Those temperatures will be cranking up over the next couple of days...expect numbers to remain in the mid to upper 90's through Wednesday.

Speaking of the heat, check out some of these numbers I ran across through a blog over at Weather Underground.... Preliminary data from the NCDC reports that 4,313 record daily highs, 293 monthly record highs, and 171 all-time record highs were observed this past July (among the approximately 5,500 various official weather sites across the nation). Many of these sites, however, have limited periods of record that do not extend back to the 1930s when the country’s greatest heat waves occurred.

Back to hoping for rain...our lone rain chance comes into the picture on Thursday...here's the breakdown:

GFS 500 mb chart at 7PM Thursday, showing a shortwave trough moving SE from Iowa/N. IL...that will lead to some uplift:

 GFS surface chart at 7PM Thursday, showing rainfall amounts remaining less than 0.10" for most:

European model (1PM Thursday) hinting that precip may not come together until this system is farther to our east:

Bottom line, even if we do get some rain Thursday, it probably won't amount to much.  The good news with this system though, is that it will bring a very nice cool down for the weekend.  A fairly strong cold front should be through the region by 7AM Friday:

This should be one of the better changes in air mass that we've seen since sometime in May...with high temperatures expected to drop to the mid/upper 80's on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  Longer range charts do show some hotter air returning by the first of next week.

Quick update on the tropics...Tropical Storm Ernesto is expected to become a hurricane tonight or tomorrow.  Here's the latest forecast track, showing Ernesto posing no threat to the U.S.

Finally, here's a check of your latest 7-day: