⚠️ An Air Quality Alert is in effect on Thursday. MORPC expects ground-level ozone pollution to reach levels that are unhealthy for sensitive groups. Read their update here.
Did you see the Full Strawberry Moon last night? It happened to have crept juuuust above our neighbor’s roofline when I went to bed last night. There was enough Canadian wildfire smoke high aloft to give it a reddish color.
The 614cast
Thursday’s tl;dr
😎 Sunshine with passing high clouds, high in the middle to upper 80s.
Forecast highlights
🍦 Typical for mid-June
The next couple of days will be seasonably warm, in the neighborhood of 87 degrees for a high. That’s about five degrees above normal, but not scorchingly hot. Plus, readings come down this weekend when more clouds and occasional showers/storms pass through. More on that below.
You’ll notice the humidity come back up as we approach the weekend, when dew points rise to the upper 60s. The higher moisture levels will help drive the potential for local downpours this weekend.
⚡ Weekend showers and storms
Most of Friday still looks dry, but I can’t rule out a passing shower or storm. By far, though, the greatest opportunities for rain will be this weekend. The afternoon and evening hours are favored. Sunday’s still the trickier of the two days to figure out… the majority of the action could end up more in southern Ohio than here. I’ll keep an eye on that and see if that trend holds.
Total rainfall amounts over a half-inch are very likely, and we might even cross the one-inch threshold. Columbus has had 2.05” of rain so far this month, and the average for an entire June is 4.33”.
🌡️ Staying warm next week
The Climate Prediction Center’s outlook for next week puts Ohio in a likelihood of temperatures staying warmer than average. Most days should be at least in the middle 80s, which is a few degrees above normal.
📊 Thursday’s almanac
Normal low/high: 61 / 82
Record low/high: 43 (1980) / 94 (1954)
Sunrise/set: 6:02 a.m. / 9:01 p.m.
📖 Weather Word Wednesday
Conditional probability
The probability that an event will occur, assuming some other event will occur or already has.
Weather forecasting is all about probability. After all, we can’t know with 100% certainty what the exact future state of the atmosphere is going to be… at least if we want to be useful. I could tell you that tomorrow’s high temperature will be between absolute zero and 10 trillion degrees and you could take that to the bank with no worry, but that’s not practical. So, we resort to probabilities of various outcomes that are more reasonable.
When I think about conditional probability in weather forecasts, my mind goes right to severe thunderstorm potential. One challenge I faced numerous times during my TV career was if storms formed, they would be intense — but getting storms to begin with was not at all a foregone conclusion.
My old KCRG colleague Corey Thompson posted about this very scenario on Bluesky back in late April:
Here’s a map of the severe weather reports from that day:
Virtually nothing in eastern Iowa. A few storms tried to make it into the northeastern part of the state, but fizzled as they got there.
These types of situations are really hard to message, because people just want to know what’s going to happen — and that’s obviously understandable! (Meteorologists want that, too! 😆) Not having a straight answer can be very unsatisfying, especially when it comes to high-impact things like severe weather. Some people have to make decisions well ahead of time (emergency management, school districts, etc.), while others deal with anxiety about storms and you don’t want put them through those emotions needlessly.
The great meteorologists Harold Brooks and the late Chuck Doswell wrote this about conditional probabilities:
The probability of a severe thunderstorm involves first having a thunderstorm. Given that there is a thunderstorm, we can estimate how confident we are that it would be severe. But the probability of a thunderstorm is itself conditioned by other factors and those factors in turn are conditioned by still other factors.
In reality, every weather forecast — no matter how routine or significant — lives in conditional probabilities. Often, though, the conditions are well understood or will not have a major negative impact if they’re are predicted incorrectly. For example, if the forecast calls for dry weather and a high of 85 but there’s somewhat more cloudiness and the high only hits 81, the consequences are pretty darn small. But when there’s more at stake, the pressure is on to 1) try to get it right, and 2) message the uncertainty clearly so people be ready to make appropriate decisions regardless of the actual weather outcome.
🌭 Bonus weather weenie content
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Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired (The Guardian)
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Canada has already surpassed a year’s worth of charred land from wildfires (Washington Post)