Good evening everyone. Over the past 24 hours or so, there have been a great deal of clouds building up in the Central Jersey region. Those clouds are in response to the approach of a vast storm system that has been making a lot of news this week. Once again there have been strong storms across much of the middle of the country, but there has also been another, more wintry component to this particular system. If you recall, last week had another massive storm that brought tornadoes to Central Arkansas, and torrential rains to Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The storm eventually headed eastward, but moved just to the south of the Central Jersey region although there was about a half an inch that fell here in Northwestern Middlesex County.

Last week’s storm didn’t have any wintry weather associated with it, but this week’s does. On the back side of the low pressure system, there has been a stretch of wintry weather in the Dakotas through the Arrowhead of Minnesota. There has even been Blizzard Conditions reported in portions of this region, particularly in the Dakotas. Further to the south and west, there has been wintry weather on the front range of the Rockies in Colorado. Near Denver, there have been reports of 10 to 20 inches of snow. Now, while snow in April is not out of the ordinary, especially in these parts (New Jersey even had a significant snowfall several days before Easter in April, 1982 when I was in sixth grade), to have such severe winter weather so close to the middle of April is quite interesting. There are still many parts of the United States including a great deal of the Northeast that has struggled to have some semblance of Spring.

Over the past couple days, temperatures in the Central Jersey area have finally gotten to levels that are Spring like. The high on Thursday here in South Plainfield was just a tad over 75 degrees with a low of 45 for a mean temperature of 60. Today’s temperature was a bit more seasonable with a high of 62, which actually happened after midnight. The clouds from the approaching storm had a lot to do with that as they prevented the solar radiation from coming in, and warming things like it had on Thursday. Prior to today, there had been virtually no rain all this week here in Northern Middlesex County. Only a hundredth of an inch of rain fell during the day on Thursday. As a matter of fact, there has only been 0.04 inches of rain over the last six days after seeing some sort of measurable rainfall in each of the first five days of April 2008.

However, the rain is going to return in a big way over the next 12 to 24 hours. The clouds continued to build during the day on Friday, and that is about to give way to some showers and storms. According to the latest Weather Bug forecast for the South Plainfield area, there is a 70 percent chance of showers and storms on this Friday night, and that is expected to continue during the overnight into Saturday morning. Lows on Friday night are expected to be in the upper 50s as the storm system is expected to first arrive as a warm front placing the Central Jersey region in the warm sector. Consequently, on Saturday, temperatures are expected to rise near or at 70 degrees for a high during the day after leftover showers start the day. Rainfall amounts for the period are expected to range between a quarter and a half an inch before things start clearing up according to the forecast from the National Weather Service office in Mount Holly, New Jersey.

There is also some concern being expressed by the NWS office outside of Philadelphia that some of the rainfall here in the Garden State as well as Pennsylvania could contain heavy downpours. According to a Hazardous Weather Outlook that was issued for the region at 3:49 PM EDT on Friday afternoon indicated that showers and thunderstorms had the potential to produce “locally heavy downpours”. The best chances for that to happen were in Northern Pennsylvania and New Jersey.