Weekend forecast: Standard mid-July weather incoming with heat, humidity, and afternoon thunderstorms
Hello everyone, Jared Smith here with your Charleston weather forecast for Saturday, July 15th, 2023.
We have a fairly standard mid-July weekend on tap with heat, humidity, and scattered afternoon thunderstorms.
We’ll start Saturday in the upper 70s before temperatures warm into the low 90s in the afternoon.
And mix in some juicy mid-70s surface dewpoints, and you’ve got heat indices heading above 100 once again, peaking close to 105 in the afternoon, particularly as the sea breeze moves by, generally in the 2-5pm time range somewhere in there.
Scattered showers and thunderstorms will be possible during the afternoon and evening hours as that sea breeze begins its inland trek.
Heavy rain and lightning are the main threats, but where outflow boundaries collide, we could see additional and stronger thunderstorms fire, with a risk for a few strong wind gusts.
As I have said until I’m blue in the face on this podcast though, it doesn’t matter whether a storm is classified severe or not for it to be dangerous, because it’s the lightning that makes every thunderstorm dangerous.
We’ll do this again on Sunday, albeit with slightly higher dewpoints and slightly warmer air temperatures, and that should send heat indices towards 105 degrees if not north of that, we may be getting close to 110 in some spots, before thunderstorms once again fire in the afternoon.
Available energy for storms may run a little bit higher too, owing to the increased dewpoints and slightly warmer surface temperatures, and that could improve the risk for a stronger storm or two, so be ready to bring outdoor plans inside at a moment’s notice.
And finally, taking a look at the tropics, subtropical storm Dawn is spinning about in the central Atlantic with winds of 45 mph.
Dawn, which was named earlier today as the fifth name-eligible storm of the season, remember we had one that went unnamed in January, isn’t fully a tropical cyclone, but has enough characteristics to be named.
It’s expected to turn northward and then more towards the east over the weekend, followed by a southeastward motion as we get into next week in a reasonably unfavorable environment.
Dawn poses no threat to land, much less to the Lowcountry.
And that was Charleston Weather Daily for July 15th, 2023.
I’m Jared Smith.
You can find Charleston Weather Forecast online at chswx.com, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at chswx, and on Mastodon at chswx at chswx.social.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.