The year’s warmest air yet is to send temperatures surging toward 80 degrees in all but immediate lakeshore areas Thursday–and across most of the Chicago metro area ahead of thunderstorms Friday. It’s a warm surge expected to send daytime readings 15 to 20 degrees above normal. Not even Wednesday’s easterly winds off Lake Michigan’s numbingly cold low 50-degree waters managed to thwart 70-degree readings in all but shoreline locations. Midway’s 73-degree high marked the seventh reading of 2008 to top 70 degrees: O’Hare’s 74-degree maximum was its sixth.
The extreme dryness of Wednesday’s air no doubt contributed to the strong warming, because dry air warms more quickly than moist air. At mid-afternoon, O’Hare’s relative humidity sank to an astoundingly low 17 percent–the driest in an April here in a quarter-century!
HAIL AND TWISTERS WALLOP PLAINS
Powerhouse thunderstorms pounded seven states Wednesday. More than 200 reports of severe weather–80 percent of them involving hail–had been filed by nightfall. Ten tornado touchdowns were recorded. Hail up to 4.5″ in diameter (softball size) pounded Lamesa, Texas. ———-
Weather Report is prepared by the WGN-TV Weather Center, where Tom Skilling is chief meteorologist. His forecasts can be seen Monday through Friday on WGN News at noon, 5:55 p.m. and 9 p.m.
WGN-TV meteorologists Steve Kahn, Richard Koeneman and Paul Dailey plus weather producer Bill Snyder contribute to this page.
IN THE WEB EDITION: For updated weather news, forecasts by ZIP code and local radar images, go to chicagotribune.com/weather or wgntv.com
