Weather

Hot weather throughout the Heartland; heat wave winds-down; sct’d rains centered across parts of the Corn Belt

Across the Corn Belt, thick smoke from wildfires in Canada and northern Minnesota blankets an area from the Great Lakes region into the Ohio Valley. Scattered showers & thunderstorms have begun to develop across the upper Great Lakes region, with convective activity expected more broadly later Friday mainly east of the Mississippi River. Except in a small area of the upper Midwest, where Friday’s high temperatures will approach 100°F, temperatures remain favorable for corn and soybeans.

On the Plains, rainfall is mostly confined to an area stretching from central Texas into southern Oklahoma. Temperatures remain in an odd configuration, with hotter weather to the north. Later Friday, high temperatures should range from 95 to 100°F in South Dakota and portions of neighboring states. Producers across the northern Plains continue to monitor the impact of recent and ongoing heat on a variety of crops, including spring-sown small grains.

In the South, locally heavy showers continue in Texas but have mostly shifted away from areas of south-central Texas hardest hit by recent flooding. The Nueces River below Uvalde, Texas, crested Thursday at a level that was 3.13 feet above the October, 1996 level. Friday high temperatures expected to reach 100°F in parts of the Carolinas. Thick smoke from distant wildfires has moved into the mid-Atlantic.

In the West, a plume of monsoon-related moisture is resulting in cloudiness and scattered showers from the Desert Southwest to the northern Rockies. With rainfall increasingly moistening the Western landscape, current wildfire concerns are limited to an area from northeastern California and northwestern Nevada into eastern Washington.