Before we start about the return of dry skies and sunshine, here’s a quick update on Hurricane Helene. Helene is now a powerful, major hurricane at category 3 strength with 120 mph winds and is expected to make landfall later tonight (10-11pm timeframe) on the Big Bend of Florida. Once Helene makes landfall, we unfortunately won’t be done talking about her. We’ll see tropical storm force winds push all the way north to Atlanta and torrential rain and flash flooding in the Carolina mountains. The National Hurricane Center is doing hourly updates on the storm, so writing about it here will be quickly outdated. If you are looking for the latest on Helene, here’s a link to the National Hurricane Center’s page on Hurricane Helene.
Locally, our damp weather will slowly exit tonight. I say damp because it didn’t rain all day, or even most of the day, but we had a lot of clouds and scattered showers around for much of the day. Those showers will continue overnight and wind down by tomorrow morning. There could be a few sprinkles that linger early tomorrow (ending by 7am), other than that the story is about the developing sun and warm temperatures for your Friday!
The weekend forecast won’t be quite as warm, but it’ll still be very nice. As Helene tries to push northward, she’ll be kept at bay by high pressure which will keep the rain south of us. That said, it won’t keep all of the clouds south of us. Most of the clouds, yes, but those high thin cirrus clouds will make it here and give us a more filtered sunshine for Saturday and Sunday.
