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Updraft® - Minnesota Weather News
Ben Cathey

Racers ready! Cooler for marathon prep & the coming weekend

The remnants of Polo hit SE Minnesota with limited rain after fog

Minnesota map with rain reports
More than 1,000 Minnesotans reported their rain totals on Wednesday morning. There was a big uptick in the rain totals near the Cities and near St. Cloud, both as we'd forecasted. Not included are the really heavy totals in northwestern Minnesota, technically from the prior day.
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Get out of here, fog! As promised, fog and a low cloud ceiling lasted well into Wednesday afternoon for southern Minnesota. It was a totally different story in the north of the North Star State. There was abundant sunshine that our staff in Duluth, Moorhead, and Grand Rapids were sequestering for themselves! Despite all that, it will still be the warmest day of the coming week in most places.

Tonight, the front trailing Tuesday’s rain gets stuck in central Minnesota. You can tell by the yellow and blue colors below in the low temps map. Friday is quite a bit cooler despite largely dry weather and some decent sunshine.

Blue and yellow over a map of Minnesota
Here are the rough low temperatures across Minnesota on Thursday. Notice the arrival of cooler air that is stalled across Minnesota around dawn on Thursday.
ECMWF via WeatherBell
High temps Thursday
We have cooler-than-normal highs on Thursday. It's a gradual drop in temps for the coming days.
ECMWF via WeatherBell

The super-stretched fire hose of rain created by the remnants of Polo are delayed a little bit but are still heading to extreme southeastern Minnesota on Thursday morning. For those not following the weather very closely, Polo was a Category Five massively powerful hurricane off of the Pacific Ocean last week, and up until earlier Tuesday. The storm has moved well inland now. With the winds effectively gone now, Polo is still a threat for much of the Great Plains. A Flood Watch actually goes all the way from New Mexico to Colorado to Kansas to Nebraska, up into Iowa and even Illinois. We just get a few small leftovers, except a little heavier near Decorah, Iowa.

Rain from Polo's remnant low
This is the tiny part of Minnesota to get a glancing hit from the leftovers of Polo. We call these the 'remnant low rains' but that's not the best term. For Iowa and other states, the remnant of a tropical system can still cause pretty bad flooding.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, via WeatherBell

The rest of us are quieter from Thursday through at least early Saturday. We are warming a tiny bit on Saturday, thanks to some small rains in northern Minnesota. That will draw up some wind and humidity from the Southern Plains, making us milder. For the Twin Cities Marathon, temps are actually idyllic. We begin the race on Sunday with temperatures in the lower 50s. We should end the day in the lower 60s, with pretty great sunshine and not a ton of wind. All in all, that’s a really nice payoff for all the training.

Drier trend ahead
This is the new ECMWF (European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting) rain total map for Minnesota. This goes from Wednesday September 30th, all the way through October 12th. Many could be dry or mostly dry for the coming 12 days!
ECMWF via WeatherBell

High pressure is set up by Sunday and we do not have many widespread chances of rain. There’s the small window for rain Thursday, plus Saturday, then that’s about it for active weather in the medium range.