Comfortable Start to the Week

A weak cool front that dropped southward across Wisconsin on Sunday is moving across the Stateline this evening.  It is poorly defined, and hard to find, and will fade from the picture before morning.  It did provide enough instability along will cold air aloft to spawn pop corn showers and thunderstorms during the afternoon.  They persisted into the evening, but have faded rapidly with the stabilizing atmosphere after sunset.  No widespread good rainfall was reported, but there were some widely scattered decent rainfall reports.  The Freeport area probably fared as well as any with around 1" indicated by Doppler radar.  The Rockford airport only recorded 0.06", and the extreme drought continues with Rockford more than 8" below average for precipitation year to date.  Not much drought relief is expected during the next 7 days, but there is at least potential for some thunderstorm development from Friday through Sunday with a pattern change from the recent high amplitude pattern that brought a nice supply of Canadian air into the country east of the Rockies.  The pattern will become more zonal, or west to east, as the week progresses.  That will allow temperatures to moderate back into the 80's.  Also, the surface fronts lying to our south will gradually dissipate allowing more humid air from the Gulf of Mexico to slowly ooze northward across the midwest before the end of the week.   It will get warm with those temperatures going above average for a few days, but no excessively hot weather anticipated any time soon.  In fact, in contrast, it looks like the following week, from Monday August 27th through Sunday September 2nd, will have below average temperatures once again, and it's looking like that week could actually have slightly above average rainfall.