A look ahead to the long term

A more summerlike pattern will be setting in across southeastern Minnesota and northern Iowa for the next week or so. But how long will warmer than average temperatures stick around? How long are we expected to be in a dry spell? While we don’t know the exact answers to these questions, we do have a general idea of what the weather may look like locally over the next 2 weeks.

The Climate Prediction Center has all of the Upper Midwest under high odds of seeing above average temperatures from September 12th through the 20th at the least. The average highs for this time of year are around 75F to start this next week, but fall to around 70F by the end of the CPC’s latest forecast period. With this said, temperatures in the 80F’s over the next week will fall well above the long term daily averages.

The upper level weather pattern going into this next week will feature a pair of high pressure ridges, one moving over us Monday and another moving over us Thursday. This will help keep the jet stream well to our north into the end of the week. A trough of low pressure will attempt to dig south toward next weekend, but current guidance shows the trough weakening and tracking north into Canada before it has a chance to reach us. This would prevent much colder air from tracking into our area, allowing the warmer temperatures to stick around into the following week.

In terms of rain, the Climate Prediction Center has us at fair odds of seeing above average precipitation through September 20th. September is typically a fairly dry month for us locally, so it won’t take as much precipitation for us to see near normal rainfall amounts for the month.

Guidance is indicating that a set of troughs will begin working their way through the area toward the middle of September, which may allow for more rain chances for us across southeastern Minnesota and northern Iowa.

With all that said, warmer than normal temperatures are predicted over the next 2 weeks, with above average precipitation predicted the next 2 weeks as well. Odds favor a more active weather pattern toward the end of the month, but there are certainly no guarantees when trying to forecast the weather that far out.