A long cold front extending from the upper Midwest to the Southwest propagates towards the Midwest and Mississippi Valley tonight bringing rain showers and some thunderstorms with it. This line of storms will shower the East Coast later in the day Thursday and into Friday morning. As this cold front brings storms, behind it follows a very sharp temperature gradient that will drop temperatures up to 30 degrees by early Friday morning! The following graphic depicts just how sharp this temperature gradient is behind this cold front that moves over half the country tonight. On the cold side of the front you see temperatures in the 20s and 30s and on the warm side temperatures are as high as the 60s and 70s with some of these drastic temperature changes occurring across the same state!
For Thursday in Champaign-Urbana we will see a round of rain showers and thunderstorms roll through in the morning hours, but storms should be clearing out by tomorrow afternoon leaving the remainder of the day mostly cloudy. After these storms pass through we are also going to see winds calm and temperatures drop during the day Thursday as this cold front passes over us. The high of 50°F tomorrow will actually occur in the early morning and temperatures will continue to drop to an evening low of 35°F. In regards to the calming winds, we’ll start the day out with a stronger NNW wind that will calm by the evening with speeds ranging form 8-23mph. On Friday temperatures will be cooler, but skies will be sunny and winds will be calmer with a high of 46°F and an early morning low of 27°F with a NNW wind at 8-14mph.
Thursday actually saw a high of 61°F, 11 degrees warmer than my predicted high along with an observed low 5 degrees colder than my forecasted low of 35°F. The average wind became more SW than NNW, but the speed did average out at what I had expected at 15.3 mph. We did also end up seeing storms Thursday in the morning hours that accumulated .13" of rain. Unlike Thursday, my Friday forecast was very accurate with my forecasted high being the same as the observed high and my forecasted low only 1 degree warmer than the actual low. Friday did end up being sunny and the observed winds were from the NW averaging between 8-14 mph like I had predicted.
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