A HEAVY RAIN EVENT IS LURKING NEARBY

The pattern continues to get rather active across the region over the next week with more rain chances Saturday, and potentially heavier rain early next week in the Monday-Wednesday time frame. Seven-day precipitation forecast from the Weather Prediction Center is rather high end, especially to the south, with widespread beneficial heavy rainfall. At face value this looks pretty, good, but locally I think it's rather optimistic.

As expected, we had a few isolated thunderstorms Friday evening across the area, especially northeast and eastern Iowa. Rain was not widespread but a few areas did pick up a good drink of water! Above you can see some of the cloud-to-ground lightning activity across Iowa.

Looking to our next weathermaker, Saturday will feature another round of showers and a few embedded thunderstorms, especially across southern Iowa. The latest HRRR forecast has a narrow, rather heavy corridor from near the Omaha, Nebraska metro to near the Quad Cities. We could see some totals approach 0.50" to 1.0".

The HREF, which is an ensemble of the high-resolution models, shows this rather well as well across southern Iowa with a slightly northern trend. This would benefit the Quad Cities quite well! That is a good look for those looking for the rainfall. There will be just enough instability to squeak out a few thunderstorms that could produce some locally heavier totals.

The rain threat develops late Friday night and continues generally on-and-off Saturday. I don't think a strong storm or two is out of the question with gusty winds and small hail, especially southern Iowa into northwest Illinois.

Early next week has the potential of some pretty heavy rain, especially to the south. While the WPC forecast shows 0.25" to 0.75" up this way, the European Ensemble is much less aggressive locally, and I think this continues to have the best picture for this next system. The ensemble average for Monday/Monday night keeps the heaviest rainfall axis to the south and southeast. There will be still some like rain locally, most likely.

Tuesday and Tuesday night, for the second push of this system, it has less than 25% chance of 0.25" in the Quad Cities, with single-digit probabilities across northern Iowa and Illinois. I think the WPC forecast is suffering from too much blending of models while I think it should be weighted more heavily to the European ensembles. I wouldn't be shocked if we see a pretty significant drop in totals early next week in the forecast across Iowa and northern Illinois. Missouri and central/southern Illinois on the other hand are looking in a good spot.

Still, light rain showers remain possible with this locally Tuesday into early Wednesday, but I am not too optimistic on big totals.

Gone are the 90s, realistically I think until next year locally, but there's a decent chance we can get back up to 80° Monday before we generally remain in the mid/upper 70s to end the month of September. This remains above normal for this time of year.

Want to end with a very Happy Birthday to Stormy the Storm Chasing Corgi! He turns five today and has seen tornadoes from Florida to Texas and of course, up in Iowa. He's a great travel companion, although sometimes his severe weather targets are questionable as they are always near the best-reviewed dog parks.

Have a great weekend, friends!

-Meteorologist Nick Stewart