Above average temperatures expected next seven days (4/26/24, 11 pm)

Good Friday evening,

The weekend is here and the weather is in transition across western North Carolina. Friday was a cool, cloudy and at times rainy day, you can thank a warm front in association to a large scale weather system in the Central US for providing the source of overrunning moisture.

This warm front will need another 12-24 hours to push through the Carolinas. Saturday is going to feature clouds again but it will slowly improve by later in the day due to the forcing moving to our northeast.

This will help transition the region into a much warner regime and it will be very noticeable on Sunday and will continue through most of next week. A large scale trough settles into the western third of the US with a nice 500 mb ridge setting up across the Eastern US.

As we get closer to the surface, high pressure will be initially centered over the Eastern Carolinas and then slowly move of the East Coast. This will keep southerly flow pumping in warm weather but the upper level forcing remains stuck in the Plains where a severe weather outbreak will continue to affect many in that part of the country.

There’s just no push coming aloft to push the Eastern US ridge well off-shore, so it should remain mostly dry.

Numerical guidance lines up well with the setup aloft, so be prepared for a stretch of hot weather coming up, at least compared to the norm for the final days of April. For comparison sake, the average high for Hickory on Wed, May 1 is 75 degrees and for Shelby is 78 degrees, so we are looking at temperatures by middle of next week 10+ degrees above normal.