Sunny Monday ahead of clouds and light showers early Tuesday

Today - Monday - sunny skies will hold supremacy following Sunday's cold front passage. Dry and cool air has settled in across Mecklenburg County, with morning lows dipping to the readings shown here:

The sunshine will boost afternoon highs into the upper 40s, a couple of degrees below the average for the first full day of astronomical winter.

Clouds will roll in after the sun sets at 5:03 p.m. (in Clarksville). A small "wrinkle" in the northwesterly upper air currents will create a weak disturbance, resulting in cloudy skies and a few light rain showers tonight into early Tuesday. Rain amounts from this dry air mass will be sparse, totaling only a couple hundredths of an inch in local gauges.

Temperatures will begin tomorrow near 40º before topping out in the low 60s for afternoon highs. By the lunch hour Tuesday skies will begin to clear, allowing the sun to do its warming thing. Southwesterly winds may gust up to 20 mph for a couple hours Tuesday afternoon before subsiding.

The rest of Christmas week then looks warmer than average, but there may be a cooler trend in the temperature forecast for Friday. A couple of forecast models are beginning to indicate that a storm system tracking eastward across the country may dip a bit further south than originally thought to end the week. That just might bring a cold air damming wedge across the Piedmont. 

Wednesday's blog post will take a closer look at that.