Storm Chances Abundant Through Thursday, Weekend Heat Follows

Lead Forecaster Daniel Crawley

Good Tuesday evening to everyone, a typical summer pattern continues here across the Western Carolinas.

Today we have seen scattered thunderstorm coverage as an upper feature moved in from the west, we are going to continue to see that over the next few days. a ridge at 500 mb is baking the Southern Plains States in heat. Meanwhile an upper trough across the Dakotas will move east the next couple days.

Here in the Southeast a lack of heights along with your typical summer humidity is allowing afternoon storms to fire up, Storm coverage will increase over the next 48 hours as the northern tier trough will help force a frontal boundary into the Southeast providing an extra focus for storms.

Below is a look at the NAM generated future radar through Thursday night. As you can see clusters of storms will generally move east. They will be most prevalent during peak heating but a token storm chance is possible at any point of the day in this pattern.

Thursday’s storms may have enough organization to promote a severe weather threat. Storm Prediction Center has highlighted the Carolinas and a lot of the Southeast with a Marginal Risk (Level 1 of 5), we’ll definitely keep an eye on it!

Weekend Heat on the Way

A change in the weather pattern will occur after Thursday’s storms, ridging aloft will begin to take over across the Southeast and that will allow things to warm up in a hurry going into the weekend. It will also cut the storm opportunities back to a select few.

The end result is a hot weekend for the Carolinas. As you can see below we have mid 90’s painted across the region.