Warmest Weather In Eight Months Arrives

The month of May is off to a great start with plenty of warmth and sunshine. We saw a high of 71 Friday, 75 Saturday, and 78 Sunday. These are the warmest temps in 3 weeks putting an end to an 11 day stint of below normal temperatures. The warmth doesn't stop there. The pattern is changing but beware, the atmosphere will become saturated and unstable this week. A stalled out front to our North will bring daily chances for storms this week in Northern Indiana. While we turn cloudy tomorrow, there should still be many dry hours. Most of the activity this week will be compressed to the North thanks to a ridge of high pressure but its possible Central Indiana could get into some of the action early week on Monday and Tuesday, especially during the peak hours of the day. We typically define the hours of 3pm-10pm as our window of opportunity for some of these instability thunderstorms. Some of these storms could be severe producing large hail and damaging winds, likely for folks North, where they are under a marginal risk of severe weather.



Temps will climb from the upper 70s, lower 80s early week to mid 80s late week. These are some of the warmest temperatures since the month of September. Its likely we'll atleast see a 70+ degree stretch of weather extending 11 or 12 days. Largest since the 11 day stretch from September 23-October 3 (see chart below). We saw our last 90 of the year on September 5th and we reached 83 on September 28th, 81 on October 2nd & 80 on October 27th. The 1st and only 80 of this year was back on April 9th.


The only thing that may keep temps down is the humidity. Dew Points will be climbing into the 60s, meaning the air is becoming heavily saturated. This can slow down the warmth. So where, we may see a 25-30 degree jump from the morning low to afternoon high in dry air, we may only see a 15-20 degree jump in more humid air.



Long range models indicate a cool down arriving between the 11th-15th time frame but folks, we are getting away from lows below 50 and highs below 60. This cool down would be refreshing with highs mostly in the 60s or 70s and lows in the 50s. On average, we see around 20 or 21 days with highs 70+ in May and 10 or 11 days with highs below 70. We average about 7 "May" days with highs 80+. There has been 16 years since 1943, that has seen atleast 1 90° day in May. The most recent years was back in 2011 and 2012. The average date of the 1st 90 typically arrives in mid June.