Pleasant Through Friday, Then A Challenging Weekend Forecast

With the exception of Dawson County, where some wind damage occurred around Lexington as a result of last night’s thunderstorm activity, most of Greater Nebraska missed any severe weather as storms that developed passed by to the north over South Dakota, or to the south over Kansas. There were three tornado reports over extreme northwestern Kansas, and numerous large hail and strong wind reports in both Kansas and South Dakota.

Now that a cool front has is now to the south of the region, high pressure over North Dakota is gaining control of the weather, and skies have cleared and highs have reached the middle 70’s north to the middle 80’s south. A moderate breeze will begin to die down toward sunset.

Skies will be mostly clear tonight, and it will be cooler than last night with lows in the 40’s.

Thursday will be mostly sunny with a lighter wind, and highs will approach 80 in most areas, so a pleasant day overall.

Friday will be mainly sunny with highs once again near 80, but another cool front will be approaching from the north, and this could set off a late day thunderstorm.
This front will likely remain near or over Greater Nebraska through the weekend, and presents challenges to the weekend forecast. Behind the front, the temperatures will be quite chilly with highs in the 50’s and 60’s, but to the south of the front it will be warm to hot with highs in the 80’s and even the 90’s. The question is where does the front establish itself? Only a two hundred mile difference in where the front is located could be the difference between highs in the 50’s and 60’s versus highs in the 80’s, or even lower 90’s. If the front stalls right over Greater Nebraska, we could see a very large temperature gradient between north and south, possibly on the order of 30 degrees or more. In addition, because of the proximity of the front, isolated storms cannot be ruled out both weekend days.

So stay tuned to KNOP-TV for the latest weather forecasts for the weekend, which will become more fine tuned especially by Friday.

Mike