CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The calendar says the seasonal transition from summer to fall happens this week and the weather is actually following the same pattern.
Humidity dominated Wednesday afternoon’s forecast, but the autumn arrival on Wednesday night into Thursday will include a pair of cold fronts which will drastically cool things off.
“We’re going to actually get back down into the fall temperatures with highs in the 70s and even in the 60s some days next week.” said Jeff Hovis, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Charleston.
Hovis said things would be very fall like with cool nights and foggy mornings.
“This time of the year when the river water is still fairly warm, and the air temperature cools off , you’ll have fog in those river valleys,” he said.
As for the first frost of the season, he said that might happen as soon as next week in the higher elevations, but the chances of that happening in the lowlands will take a while.
“There’s a chance at least in the higher elevations we could be getting close by the middle of next week but down in the lowlands, we might get temperatures down near 40, but not that low yet,” Hovis said.
It was the wettest summer on record for the Charleston office of the National Weather Service.
As part of the storm warning system, the NWS added a new tag to emphasize the severity of pending storms. Some Severe Thunderstorm Warnings and Flood Warnings were tagged “damage threat.” Hovis said it was to separate severity of warnings, but they didn’t use the new tag very much.
“We didn’t use it very often with the severe weather, I know we used it more for the flash flood warnings,” he explained.
Prior to the new tag the base warning was setting off a lot of alarms like people’s phones. Some were unnecessary and causing people to become complacent and ignore the warnings. The “damage threat” tag would be a higher level of concern and trigger more intensity and urgency with the warning.