Bring in your pets and sensitive plants (or cover them if you can’t bring them in) as the first freeze of the season is expected tonight into Saturday morning to close out climatological fall and welcome in climatological winter on December 1. Temperatures will fall into the low 30s across much of the metro by morning, and a Freeze Warning is in effect for the entire Tri-County area as a result. Despite several days of cold air ahead, including even colder air next week, this will be the only Freeze Warning of the season as the growing season will come to an end on December 1, regardless of how far to the east freezing temperatures penetrate. Frost and freeze alerts resume on March 1, 2025.
After that very chilly start, we’re warming to only the mid-50s in the afternoon despite mostly sunny skies. Northerly winds 5-10 MPH will keep temperatures feeling like the mid-40s through early afternoon.
Winds go calm overnight Saturday into Sunday morning, and we’ll see another very chilly morning as a result, with the potential for widespread frost particularly inland. Lows should bottom out in the low 30s once more. (If it doesn’t freeze again, it’ll be close.) Highs will recover a bit to the upper 50s on Sunday afternoon, but that’s still well below normal for the first of December.
We have another shot of even colder air in store for early next week, with lows in the 20s across the metro possible Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Tuesday may not even get out of the 40s! Colder-than-normal temperatures and rain-free conditions look to continue through next Friday.
We won’t have the best weather on Thanksgiving Day, unfortunately, as a strong cold front moves through the area. It’ll bring with it some gusty winds and eventually some showers and even a few thunderstorms as we get into the afternoon and evening hours. It’ll be a warm and humid day by late November standards, with lows in the upper 50s to around 60° yielding to the mid-70s in the afternoon. This could help provide sufficient instability within a fairly well-sheared airmass to produce a strong to severe thunderstorm or two as the front approaches, with damaging straight-line wind gusts the main concern. The timing for storms appears to be generally between about 2pm-9pm, progressing west-to-east. It’s possible not everyone will see a storm or even any rain, but we just need to keep an eye on the storms that do fire to make sure they behave.
We have quite the weather rollercoaster in store for the Thanksgiving 2024 holiday period. First, Wednesday will run much warmer than normal despite a frontal passage Tuesday night; expect lows in the mid-50s to yield to highs in the low 70s under partly cloudy skies as the front lingers just to the south. We’ll stay rain-free on Wednesday, though showers will be approaching from the west with another, stronger frontal system.
Tuesday begins an occasionally unsettled period of weather that’ll last through early Black Friday as a series of fronts moves through the area. The first one, poised to move through Tuesday evening, won’t be terribly strong; it’ll kick up some cloud cover and maybe a few showers as well out ahead of it, but it won’t really affect the airmass all that much. We’ll start Tuesday in the low 50s, warming to the low to mid-70s in the afternoon. Dewpoints will surge back into the 60s for a brief period, but those will begin to fall by evening as the front moves by.
