St. Patty's Week forecast

Just as the Mid-South started to get a taste of spring last week, and even a round of severe thunderstorms on Wednesday night, the weekend was a reminder that it is technically still winter. Cloudy, gray days, patchy showers, and cool temps greeted the area, thanks to the influence of a very strong low pressure system on the east coast that brought tropical storm-force wind, buckets of wind-swept rain, hundreds of thousands of power outages, and hundreds of cancelled flights to the major metros of the Northeast.

Currently, we're still sitting between this system, which continues to hang around in the eastern Atlantic, and high pressure over the Northern Plains. This will mean another semi-gray day, with maybe a few more peeks of sun and less shower activity than yesterday, and high temps in the upper 50s with a cool northerly wind funneling into the region between these two weather systems. Tomorrow will see more sun, though not completely sunny, and similar temps near 60 as the low loses some of it's influence.

By St. Patrick's Day on Wednesday, an upper-level low pressure system will bring the clouds back and provide a slight chance of light rain with temps still near 60. Conditions definitely improve by Thursday and Friday as high pressure moves to our southeast, bringing warm wind off the Gulf of Mexico back into the region and allowing high temperatures to approach the 70 degree mark by week's end.

For the weekend, it appears we may be in store for another springtime storm front. Details are still being ironed out, but I went ahead with "likely" chances of showers and thunderstorms Saturday in the MWN Forecast, as one way or another there's a decent bet we'll get some rain. We'll continue to monitor as the week goes along, as I know there are some fairly major events planned for this weekend in the city.

As a reminder, and as posted earlier, MWN underwent some cosmetic changes this weekend that required changing the URL's of nearly all pages on the site from .html pages to .shtml pages. Please change your bookmarks accordingly. The front page of the site is still http://www.memphisweather.net/, but if you bookmarked the front page with index.html, you need to change it to index.shtml. For the next couple of weeks, it will automatically forward you to the right page.

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