A few storms next few days. Widespread rain and heat relief later this week and weekend!
The National Weather Service in Memphis is keeping a Heat Advisory in place for western Tennessee and north Mississippi, including Hardin and Tishomingo Counties in our viewing area, valid until this evening. There's a reasonable chance they may eventually have to extend this or reissue this for Tuesday or possibly even Wednesday, but changes are on the way this week, and we will eventually say goodbye to these tripe digit heat index values for a little while. It's just going to take a few more days to get there!
It's a sultry morning across the Tennessee Valley on this Monday, with temperatures and dewpoints well up into the 70s areawide at this 4:00 am hour. VIPIR Live Radar is quiet across our immediate local area this morning, but a regional look of satellite and radar shows an expansive area of showers and thunderstorms to our north over the Ohio Valley and back into the Plains. This is in association with a stationary front over those regions to our north. The front eventually becomes less stationary as we head through the week, and it gradually shifts in our direction.
Hot and humid conditions will start develop as we head into the late morning and midday, with temperatures climbing through the 80s into the lower 90s by the afternoon and heat index values topping out in the lower 100s. Those areas to the west in the heat advisory we previously outlined may have heat index values closer to 105 degrees.
Scattered showers and thunderstorms will be with us once again today as we head through the midday and afternoon into the evening. Not every person across our area is going to see rain today by any means, but it looks like showers and storms will be a little more widespread than they were on Sunday, and several of us saw at least brief rainfall on our Sunday. If you do get under one of these storms, expect heavy rainfall and frequent lightning for a short time, in addition to maybe some isolated gusty winds. These storms look to carry into the early to mid evening before weakening later overnight with the loss of daytime heating.
We look to do this all over again on Tuesday and Wednesday with widely scattered hit or miss storms and daytime highs in the lower 90s. However, as we head through Thursday, Friday, and the weekend, the ridge of high pressure aloft weakens, and the frontal boundary to our north starts moving southward toward our area. Within this period, showers and thunderstorms become more widespread each day, and they will be possible both during the daytime and overnight hours each day in this period. Some of the rainfall may be heavy at times. It won't be an all day washout any of these days, and not everyone is guaranteed to get rain every day in this period, but rain chances will be a good bit higher. Some of the rainfall may also be locally heavy at times and a few storms may be locally strong with gusty winds. The good news is that, with clouds and rain around and the upper high weakening, temperatures will have the opportunity to take a step down, with daytime highs dropping back to the 80s for late week and the weekend.
Meanwhile, the tropical Atlantic continues to remain quiet, and we do not expect any tropical systems to develop in the Atlantic basin over at least the next 5 to 7 days. However, there are signs that large scale conditions become more favorable for tropical development over the Atlantic basin as we start to head into early August. There are no actual particular systems on the board to watch, but the background environment looks to become more favorable in that period. We will be watching carefully.