I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. The afternoon was very comfortable and filled with lots of sunshine. Highs Thursday reached 47 degrees in Rockford, just a handful of degrees above average!
The overall weather pattern heading into the weekend and early next week is expected to remain fairly quiet. A strong low pressure system developing Thursday evening near the Canadian/US border will quickly race east, through the Plains and Upper Midwest by Friday evening. Ahead of the low a very warm air mass will be drawn northward for Friday, pushing temperatures up near 60 degrees! Winds will also remain gusty from the southwest with peak wind gusts to 35 mph.
Winds within the jet stream will be moving mostly from west to east through early next week. This will help block any Arctic air from making much progress southward. We will get cold fronts to pass through, but the air following those fronts will not be from the Arctic. Temperatures will drop, but considering the time of year those numbers following the cold fronts could be a lot colder.
With the jet stream pattern more from west to east, any moisture from the Gulf of Mexico will be blocked as well. This means incoming storm systems will have limited moisture associated with them. There is a cold front that will pass through Wisconsin and Illinois Friday evening, and this will most likely bring a few rain showers with it during that time. But any heavy or prolonged period of rain is not expected for the next several days.
The image on the left is the 5 day rainfall total for the entire country. Notice how the majority of rain is forecast to fall over the Northwest, southern Canada and over the far Southeast. By the middle of next week there does look to be a better chance for rain with a cut-off low pressure system. Right now it looks like that may pass either late Wednesday night or sometime on Thursday.
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