OAK HILL, WV (WOAY) – We started off October today with plenty of sunshine and mild temperatures. Highs wound up near 80 degrees in many areas, with lower to mid-70s in the traditionally colder spots. Tonight, the warming trend will continue, and lows will drop into the upper 50s and lower 60s.
Tomorrow, the front that we have been tracking for the past few days finally arrives in our area. Even though the low is well to our north over Canada, it will still be able to tap into moisture from both the Gulf and also bring along the moisture from what was once major Hurricane Polo. There will be some showers around for the Friday night football games, so having the rain gear will be a good idea.
Temperatures fall through the 60s as the games go on, so it will be warmer than it was last week.
The weekend ahead will feature good rain chances. An isolated storm or two can’t be ruled out, but severe weather is not expected. What will be possible is flooding, especially by Sunday, as heavy rain could fall in the same area on multiple occasions, something we call training. This is because the front will become quasi-stationary just to our south, before finally getting kicked out by high pressure pushing through the Great Lakes region. How far south the front stalls will determine how much rain we see, and the major atmospheric models that we look at are drier than before, but they are still calling for around one inch of rain over the next seven days, most of that on Saturday and Sunday.
With that in mind, any flooding concerns should be mainly confined to standing water in low-lying spots and ponding water on the roads. Luckily, we’ve been dry over most of the last couple of weeks.
After the front pushes through, skies will clear, and temperatures will cool off quite a bit compared to where they are right now. Highs will be in the lower 60s and lows in the lower 40s. But the cooldown is a brief one, and readings rebound nicely late in the forecast.
A LOOK BACK AT SEPTEMBER AROUND THE REGION
Now that we’ve turned the calendar over to October, we can take a look back at September and see how we did in terms of temperatures and precipitation. In Beckley, 22 of the 30 days last month saw above-normal highs, with the below-normal readings almost entirely confined to a cool spell at the end of September.
The warmer-than-normal trend was even more dramatically highlighted by taking a look at the low temperatures. There were only six days below normal, and one was right on normal. Overall, the average temperature of 69.7 degrees was five degrees above normal. This is the sixth month this year that has been warmer than normal.
Precipitation-wise, September was much wetter than normal. The 5.80″ of rain was more than two-and-a-half inches above the normal (3.20″). The total was largely due to a storm on the 22nd that dropped more than 2″ in the bucket at the Raleigh County Memorial Airport, part of a 5-day stretch that saw more than 4″ of rain.
The other official climate reporting stations in our area (Bluefield and Lewisburg) also saw above-normal temperatures in September. Similar to Beckley, Lewisburg was more than five degrees above normal, while Bluefield finished the month nearly four degrees above normal. Precipitation-wise, the two cities saw a different situation than Beckley. Both were below normal; Bluefield by nearly an inch and Lewisburg by nearly 1.5 inches.
Click below for a video version of the forecast…
https://youtu.be/JcciN_xBS7U
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