Winnipeg and the Red River Valley will be basking in hot, sunny weather this week as an upper ridge pushes it’s way across the Prairies. We’ll see a chance of thunderstorms on Thursday evening as a disturbance rolls through the RRV, but quickly return to sunny, warmer-than-seasonal weather.

A broad southerly flow ahead of an incoming upper ridge has pumped temperatures up over Southern Manitoba back to the 30°C mark. 850mb temperatures will climb up to nearly 20°C today, which will allow our daytime high to soar towards 31 or 32°C. The warm air in place over us will also result in a dramatically warmer overnight low; while the past couple nights have dropped into the low-to-mid teens, we’ll see the mercury barely dip below 20°C tonight.

The normal daytime high for late August in Winnipeg is about 24°C. The normal overnight low is about 11°C.

Thursday will be another warm day, however an incoming shortwave will slide along the International Border through the day, bringing some showers on Thursday morning to SW MB and the risk of an isolated thunderstorm to the Red River Valley, from the Winnipeg area all the way south to Fargo. If storms develop, they’ll develop late in the afternoon along a weak trough line that’s expected to develop in response to the upper feature. Ultimately, I think that most of the storms will remain south of the border with only a very slight chance of anything popping up on the Manitoba side of the RRV. Scott’s Southern Manitoba Mesonet will be a great way to track the trough through the afternoon to see if the threat for storms has passed by you. Despite the heat that will be present with daytime highs near 30°C, dynamics look fairly weak and I do not expect that any storms that may develop will become severe.

We’ll see temperatures dip to around 15°C on Thursday night. On Friday, we’ll see plenty of sun and daytime highs continuing to be near 30°C.

For the weekend, it looks like a cold front will sweep into the province on Saturday, bringing with it some showers and cooler weather; daytime highs look to be in the low-20’s for Saturday. Temperatures look to rebound quickly on Sunday, though, with highs pushing back to the high-20’s. So despite our rather cool start to the month, we may yet come out with our 14th consecutive month of above-normal temperatures in Winnipeg. 5 days out of the next 7 are forecast to have daytime highs at least 3°C above normal, and overnight lows look to remain above normal as well.