Hey, we made it through the first week of this newsletter! I’m sending this only on weekdays, so the next issue will be on Monday.
The 614cast
Weekend tl;dr
🌦️ Dry with filtered sunshine Saturday, periods of rain Saturday night–Sunday. Highs near 80 both days.
Forecast highlights
☂️ Saturday looks better than Sunday
As promised, the rain and storms the past couple of days have been very scattered with a lot dry time each day. The frontal boundary that’s helped spark that activity slips down toward the Ohio River early this weekend, far enough south to keep rain chances away from us during the day Saturday.
However, another disturbance lifts the front back north Saturday night into Sunday, renewing our rain chances. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the rain were locally heavy, although flooding isn’t a concern.
At the moment, it looks like Sunday afternoon’s rain chance is lower than in the morning, so we might be able to still get some use of the day outdoors.
👍 Feeling fine for early June
Okay, so it hasn’t been like a sauna, but it’s admittedly been relatively humid the past few afternoons. As I noted yesterday, dew points will be a bit lower this weekend and trend down further next week.
Highs stay close to 80 straight through the first half of next week, which is right near average. That’s some nice weather for this time of year, especially after incoming high pressure drives out the storm chance after Monday.
📊 Saturday’s almanac
Normal low/high: 59 / 80
Record low/high: 39 (1977) / 95 (1933)
Sunrise/set: 6:03 a.m. / 8:58 p.m.
📰 National Weather Service staffing in the news
A quick background: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and everything in its umbrella, including the National Weather Service (NWS), are within the federal Department of Commerce. Between terminating early-career employees (so-called “probationary” because they’d been feds for less than a year) and incentivizing people leave or retire early, the NWS has lost well over 500 staff just this year.
Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, testified to Congress this week that there have been no firings and the NWS is fully staffed. This CNN article by Andrew Freedman, a veteran weather and climate reporter, describes the inaccuracies of Lutnick’s claims.
If you’d like a more detailed inside-baseball assessment, I highly recommend this post:
In addition, NBC news has this look into one particular NWS office. It happens to be the office that serves my hometown growing up, and Congressman Eric Sorensen was the chief meteorologist at my first job at WREX-TV in Rockford, Illinois.