High Temps Around Garden State To Approach Records On Friday

Enjoy Thursday’s weather?  Well, more of the same is expected on Friday with the mercury again climbing into the mid to upper 70s.  So, records around the Garden State are expected to threaten records that go back to 1923. 

The southwesterly flow that has dominated the weather around Northwestern  Middlesex County as well as the rest of New Jersey, is expected to hang around for one more day.  Unlike Thursday, skies are already sunny, which may provide a boost to temperatures a little bit although they were down in the upper 40s to low 50s for overnight lows.

Yesterday, there was no record in Newark contrary to a previous post that I had in the blog on Thursday night.  The record temperature for March 22nd in Newark is 80 degrees set back in 1938.  The actual temperature on Thursday in Newark reached 78 degrees.  The mercury did reach 80 degrees in Chatham out in Morris County.  The average temperature for March 22nd in Newark  is 53 degrees.

The Garden State was not the only place for record high temperatures.  So far this March, there have been over 3,000 locations throughout the United States that set record high temperatures.  Chicago is one of those places.  For the ninth straight day, the Windy City had highs above 80 for seven of the last eight days.  Yesterday, temperatures soared to 87 degrees, which broke the record for the date set back in 1977 according to Bloomberg.

With the unusually warm weather this March, we have had quite a range in diurnal temperature.  The spread in temperature between the monthly high of 77.1 degrees and the monthly low of 24 degrees, the monthly range in temperature was 53.1 degrees.  The dew point on Thursday was 63.9 degrees, and so far on Friday, there is still quite a bit of moisture with the dew point reaching 59.7 degrees as of the time of this report.  The heat index on Thursday climbed up to 79.1 degrees, which is the highest so far this month.

The forecast for Friday in South Plainfield is calling for partly sunny skies, and a high temperature of near 76 degrees.  Some records could fall around the Garden State.  However, the nice stretch of warm weather will come to an abrupt end on Saturday as clouds will move in along with some scattered showers during the day giving way to more steady rain on Saturday night and Sunday.  Temperatures will only top out in the low 60s on Saturday and Sunday.