Weekend weather: A bit of rain and thunder at times
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The Memorial Day weekend is almost here. I’m sure that you’ve heard the mention of rain in the holiday weekend forecast. It’s important to note that we aren’t expecting any all-day rains.
Many parts of Minnesota and western Wisconsin will have some episodes of showers and embedded thunderstorms Saturday and Sunday. There’ll also be many dry hours each day. Memorial Day may be the driest day of the three-day weekend, but one forecast model does show a chance of scattered showers and an isolated thunderstorm on Monday. Check forecast updates over the next few days.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s North American Mesoscale (NAM) forecast model shows this potential rain pattern Saturday and Saturday evening:
Pay more attention to the patchy nature of the rain coverage than the exact location of the rain. Thunderstorm coverage will be influenced by many factors, including the amount of cloud cover during peak heating.
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Temperatures
Our average Twin Cities high temperature is 71 degrees on May 23. We’ll probably top out in the mid to upper 70s in the metro area this Saturday. There’ll be a lot of highs in the 70s across Minnesota and western Wisconsin.
Parts of northeastern Minnesota will have Saturday highs in the 60s.
Saturday winds will be moderate, but we could see a few afternoon gusts of 14 to 18 mph:
Plotted gusts are in knots, with 12 knots equal to 14 mph. Higher gusts can be expected near any thunderstorms that develop.
Back to temperatures, there’ll be a lot of highs in the 70s on Sunday:
A few spots in far southeastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin will top 80 degrees.
Memorial Day highs will be mainly in the 70s, with some 60s near Lake Superior:
Memorial Day extremes
The Minnesota State Climatology Office took a look at our Twin Cities Memorial Day weekend weather from 1971 through 2019. The hottest Memorial Day temp in Twin Cities weather records for that period was 100 degrees, set in 2018. The coldest Memorial Day high temperature was 49 degrees, in 1992. This Memorial Day we’ll be about midway between those two extremes.
