Near Two Harbors, 34 structures burned and Highway 61 closed; in Crow Wing County, a 1,600-acre fire sparked evacuations

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The balance of your Memorial Day will be quite warm, even hot in a few places. We’ll bookend a low severe storm chance way up on the North Shore, and in the far southwestern corner of the state by evening Monday. 

Please be really careful if you happen to have fireworks planned for Memorial Day’s evening. There’s a ‘near critical’ fire danger for the Brainerd Lakes area for the rest of Monday. Monday will also be one of the warmest days so far in 2026, as we shoot for a high in the upper 80s around the Twin Cities. Of course, it’s feeling even hotter, thanks to relatively light winds and high relative humidity. 

I think for most people, the big ‘talker’ at the coffee shop will be the heat building in through Tuesday and Wednesday. The WPC has this ‘heat risk’ product and most of Minnesota is in the orange - especially on Tuesday. High temperatures will be close to 90 degrees for one of the first times this year. Because the corn and beans have just gone into the ground, we are not in corn sweat season but it’s still a little humid thanks to air racing to the stagnant cold front along the Canadian/USA border, just to our north. 

As such, we’ll have some thunderstorms creeping in early Tuesday from South Dakota. With the stagnation theme of that cold front turning stationary through mid-week, we’ll have unsettled weather at times. A good marker for where the storms form is along and south of Interstate 94 through Wednesday. We will be only a couple of degrees cooler - so still pretty toasty - through the weekend. 

Because the rain really is not that widespread on a statewide level this week, nor was it apart from last Friday, we could see our drought expand later this week.

Weather and Climate News

Updraft® - Minnesota Weather News

Ben Cathey

Author

Minnesota braces for dangerous heat, spotty storms and growing drought concerns this week.

‘Moderate’ heat risk the next few days

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