DC Weather: Clouds and showers return Thursday

Thank you, Sharon. Okay, over here with my pal Mike in the Weather Center, and it looks like we're going to do a big switcheroo from the sunglasses and shorts. Can I do that again? What are we doing? The switcheroo. Oh, the switcheroo. You look like you're doing a little DJ. Yeah, I know, right? I'm spinning the decks, the weather decks here. But I just like saying switcheroo, to be honest. But, yeah, the sunglasses, the shorts, toss them out, get the jacket. Don't put them too far away because you're going to need them again on Friday. I mean, we are doing that fall roller coaster in a kind of extreme way this year. 90 degrees today. We had not been 90 since September 10th was the last day we had hit it prior to today. And that's typically around when we see our last 90s of the year, during that front half of September. A little rare that we get one like this this afternoon. Now, back to sort of reality briefly tomorrow. More clouds in the sky and some showers likely. Some of the new guidance suggesting we might see some peaks of sun early in the day and start the morning hours off, particularly D.C. and areas to the north, a little drier. But as the afternoon goes on, clouds come back, showers come back. It's sort of one of those days where we're going to dodge a few through the afternoon. Tonight, still very mild. I mean, we're still above your average daytime high, which is now just 70 degrees. But as we've rounded the 10 o'clock hour, we're hanging out at 75 at the moment. Same for Fairfax. Waldorf at 74. So is London Town, Prince Frederick, Colonial Beach. Bowie at 71. Leesburg, 77. So is Lovettsville, Germantown, 74. Columbia, Maryland at 75 degrees tonight. Cold front inbound. This is why we're so mild, right? But out ahead of these cold fronts, you sort of get a surge of southern winds. You also get humidity that kind of peaks right ahead of these fronts. So that's holding temperatures up just a bit. And you can certainly see along it, we have some rain showers coming across, mostly in our western zones here. The I-81 corridor, taking me from that I-66 exchange in the area south of there, getting a good soaking. Northern fringe of it, seeing some light shower activity. And you see a little bit more popping up north of I-70 there this evening. Just some sprinkles and showers. And that will be the case for much of the second half of the day tomorrow. Clouds will come back. It will be a cooler-leaning day. In fact, whatever our temperature is in just a couple of hours, right after midnight tonight, should be the high temperature for tomorrow as temps will then drop all day on the back of these northeasterly winds that will take over throughout the course of the overnight hours tonight. Clouds, maybe if we're lucky some sun, you'll see FutureCast here. It has a pretty good handle on where the heaviest of the rains is tonight. It has some showers passing by D.C. during the early part of the overnight. But there's your 5, 6 o'clock hour. Notice around D.C. and areas to the north showing a little bit of sunshine that tries to linger late morning into about lunchtime. Rain down towards the Charlottesville area that then starts to bubble north as we head towards the middle part of the afternoon. So, you know, morning hours, improvement compared to some of the guidance we were looking at earlier today, but still turns showery during the second half of it, and those showers go through the overnight at least into early Friday morning. When we might start the day with showers, we turn winds out of the south, clear rapidly. And with that clearing comes warmer temperatures. We're talking low to mid-80s again on your Friday. That does not last long. This front, sharp line of showers and storms. Some of those could pack some pretty gusty winds, too, because this is a strong cold front. And it's going to knock our high temperatures down to the 50s through much of the upcoming weekend. We'll talk more about that later in the show. Jim.