Unfortunately as we head toward the long holiday weekend, as well as UK's home opener, the weather is appearing less and less cooperative. What started as a storm chance for Saturday is now looking likely. The rain chances will also remain high through the rest of the long holiday weekend, but that part has been in our forecast for a few days. Even on Friday, an isolated storm is a possibility, and we have that 'silent 20' in the forecast. Rain is not likely, but if you see an isolated t-shower, it's not a surprise.
Saturday's rain may even come down heavily at times. We have a marginal risk for locally heavy downpours on Saturday covering most of the area which could make tailgates interesting if the heavy rain happens to find the southside of campus.
Overall, the basin wide averages for Saturday put us into the plus/minus a half inch range. The rain amounts may be a bit heavier as we go south, but that's also the averages. The isolated downpours can put down significantly more than that.
We've also entered 'meteorological fall' today which means we can look back on the season that was, 'meteorological summer'. It ended up as the 8th warmest overall and about 2 degrees above normal. Most of that heat was in the first half of the season in June and July. It becomes telling when you look at the number of 90 degree days. Again, most of these were early in the season and in fact through early August we were in the top 5 for the number of 90s to date. As August cooled compared to the early season, we only added a couple of more. We still finished above average with 33. Finally, we were really dry through the first half of summer, but a wet second half took us to the 56th wettest we've seen. We emphasized that this was the Lexington total. There were parts of eastern Kentucky that tragically saw that much rain in a night.
