Hello everyone, Jared Smith here with your Charleston weather forecast for Friday, June 30th, 2023, with a look into the weekend as well.

Well folks, it’s here! Real summer! Heat and humidity begins to tick up heading into the weekend, just in time for the July 4th holiday.

Friday will feature highs topping out in the mid-90s once again, but with dewpoints only mixing out to around 69 or 70 degrees, expect heat indices to push 100 degrees in the afternoon.

A stray shower or storm can’t be totally ruled out, but it looks like storms will be few and far between ahead of the sea breeze in the afternoon and evening hours, and any storms that do fire should fizzle after sunset.

And we do this all over again on Saturday, except dewpoints will run a few degrees warmer, and this is going to drive heat indices to around 102-103 degrees.

And it wouldn’t shock me to see a brief surge towards or even past 105 as the sea breeze makes its way by either.

And once again, we’ll want to watch for a storm or two in the afternoon, but most of us should stay rain-free.

By Sunday, the humidity really turns up, and we see the air temperature tick upward too as a strong ridge of high pressure aloft starts moving more our direction.

Highs around 95 degrees combined with dewpoints near 76 will send heat indices close to 110, which is heat advisory criteria for July 1st and beyond.

Once again, a stray storm is possible, but don’t count on one for relief.

So with the first real summer heat of the season on the way, it’s important to recognize and remember the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

Heat exhaustion generally presents as someone becoming faint or dizzy, sweating a lot, and having cool and clammy skin.

They might be feeling nauseous, they might be throwing up, and might be experiencing muscle cramps as well as they get dehydrated.

Get someone suffering from heat exhaustion in a cool place as soon as you can.

Ensure they’re drinking plenty of water if they’re fully with it.

Get some cool compresses on them, maybe get them into a cold shower.

Try to get that body cooled off, that’s the key.

Now heat stroke, on the other hand, is a 911-worthy emergency.

This is when the body essentially stops sweating and this is when it gets really dangerous.

Hot dry skin, bad headache, body temperature around 103 degrees, nausea, vomiting, even loss of consciousness are sure signs to get someone immediately to a cooler place to await emergency help.

Don’t wait on this, this is a dangerous situation.

So how can you avoid heat exhaustion and heat stroke?

Well it’s simple.

Drink plenty of water, keep that water coming.

Take breaks if you need to be outside, preferably in the shade.

And if you can be in air conditioning during the peak hours of the day, probably the best call there.

Do those things and you’re going to be just fine.

The only other thing of note to watch as we get into the weekend will be the potential for thunderstorm complexes to head our direction as they round the aforementioned ridge of high pressure over the next few days.

It’s hard to give much more than a day’s lead time on these, so keep an ear out to forecast updates for potential day of changes to rain chances.

But otherwise, the going forecast for isolated to scattered showers and thunderstorms each afternoon looks pretty good.

And that was Charleston Weather Daily for June 30th, 2023.

I’m Jared Smith.

You can find Charleston weather forecasts online at chswx.com, on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at chswx, and on Mastodon at chswx at chswx.social.

Thanks for listening, stay cool, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.