Good morning everyone. After several nice days to start the week here in the Central Jersey area, the skies grew cloudy on Thursday with some showers during the day, and then after a brief respite, heavy rains kicked in during the evening and overnight. Add to that the prospect of more of the same on Friday with some possible thunderstorms, and you have a recipe for flooding. As a result, the National Weather Service has issued a Flood Watch for the region.

Looking at the latest data from the GWC WX Station here in South Plainfield, there has already been 0.06 inches of rain on Thursday night, and 0.26 inches on Friday for a current storm total of 0.32 inches. So far during the month of May, there has been a total of 0.41 inches of rainfall while there was 2.93 inches in April. Currently, the Flood Watch stretches along the I-95 corridor from south of Washington, D.C. in Virginia through Delaware, and Eastern Pennsylvania into New Jersey and the New York City Metropolitan area. The local forecast for Central Jersey calls for a 100 percent chance of rain with amounts ranging from one to two inches during the day on Friday. Then, on Friday night, there is still a 50 percent chance of showers with possible amounts ranging between a quarter to a half an inch.

Moving on to Saturday, the skies look to be partly to mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon and evening. A slight chance of showers exists for Sunday with that becoming more likely on Sunday night with a 70 percent chance of rain. So, in a nutshell, it looks to be yet another wet and gloomy weekend for the most part. If things live up to the forecast expectation, it will be the third straight weekend of some sort of inclement weather. Returning to the weather data from here in Northwestern Middlesex County, the mean temperature from Sunday through Thursday has been above 60 degrees with the highest high during that period rising to 78 degrees while the lowest low temperature was 45 on the same day (May 6th). Consequently, the diurnal temperature range for the 6th was the highest of the week at about 33 degrees. So far this month, the average mean temperature has been 58 degrees with the mean max moving reaching 68 degrees while the mean min falling to only 48 degrees.