A Rainy Start and Tropical Storm Harvey

It's not exactly the best way to start a Monday; dense fog and light rain showers.  Luckily, visibilities have become more manageable, with Rockford still being at around 4 miles visibility.  Within an hour, those visibilities will be back to normal, but unfortunately the rain will remain.  Isolated rain showers will stay in play the entire day, with storm chances in the afternoon.  The storm chances will be for our eastern counties starting at around 1pm, but everywhere else will see the isolated showers.

The cold front, which will develop the thunderstorms over our eastern counties this afternoon, will clear out around 7pm, and at that time those isolated rain showers should die down.  We'll stay clear going through the overnight as we'll have cool, dry inflow from the north, bringing temperatures into the upper 50's.  That cooler inflow won't affect temperatures a whole lot tomorrow, but it'll clear our skies and allow to have lots of sunshine!  This will affect our temperatures, bringing them into the upper 70's.  Even more sunshine will be seen Wednesday when we'll have a more high pressure influence over our area, and this will warm our temperatures even more into the low 80's.

The high pressure system will push in more cool air on Thursday and Friday, cooling our temperatures back into the mid 70's, but we still hang on to the sunshine.  Unfortunately, the nice weather doesn't last forever as warm, humid inflow will channel into our area for the weekend.  We'll also have a low pressure system move in, and both of these factors will also for thunderstorm development both Saturday and Sunday.

Tropical Storm Harvey Update:
Tropical Storm Harvey's winds have died down quite a bit since yesterday, now down to around 40mph, which is only a couple miles per hour away from being downgraded to a Tropical Depression.  However, the system is nowhere near done with the Texas Coastline, as moisture continues flowing onto the land, generating more heavy rain bands.

Over 20" has fallen so far in a few locations, with 20 more inches expected to fall during the week.  Total accumulations in some areas, from when Harvey moved in to when it dies, will add up to around 50".  That's 4 feet of rain!!  Along with the rain, 30 tornadoes have been reported so far in Harvey, and a few tornado reports are already showing up over in Louisiana, where the heavy rain bands have expanded to.  The coastline has gotten a lot of everything; heavy rain, tornadoes, and very strong winds.

Tropical Storm Harvey is expected to push towards northeast Texas, where it's expected to die out this weekend.