By Skip Rigney

Are you growing tired of almost perfect weather? Do blue skies, sunny days, and starry nights have you feeling down? Do you long for either blazing heat, numbing cold, or oppressive humidity?

If so, it looks like you are in the middle of a pretty rough stretch. We have been enjoying gorgeous spring weather for the past several days.

The forecast is for abundant sunshine today and Wednesday. Clouds will increase Thursday, but we are still likely to see quite a bit of sun.

Try to enjoy the clouds, showers and thunderstorms forecast for Friday, because that is the only foreseeable break predicted in the stretch of nice weather that began last weekend and will be back after the interruption on Friday.

An unusually cool air mass for this time of year swept over the eastern one-third of the nation beginning May 5 and through the weekend with temperatures five to fifteen degrees below average.

The cold front at the leading edge of that cooler air passed through Pearl River County the morning of May 4.

Strong winds from the northwest gusting to near 30 miles per hour on Friday kept pumping cooler air into south Mississippi.

Low temperatures on Friday and Saturday mornings dipped into the 40s across the county, which was about ten to fifteen degrees below average and on Friday was just a few degrees above the record cold temperatures for that date.

That cool air mass has had several days now to be warmed up by the southern May sun and our winds have now shifted back around to southerly.

Forecasters are predicting that during the rest of this week our early morning low temperatures will be close to 60 degrees, which is very close to average for the second week of May.

Afternoons will be warm through Thursday with highs in the 84 to 87 degree range. The southerly winds over the next few days will bring back enough moisture that by Thursday at least some of us will feel that the humidity has risen out of the comfortable range and begun to feel a little sticky.

By Thursday the next low pressure storm system will be spinning up near the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and heading eastward. Trailing to its south will be our next cool front.

By Friday the low is forecast to have moved into or near central or north Mississippi, and showers and thunderstorms will form to its south over our area.

Some of the thunderstorms could become strong, so keep up on the weather on Friday.

However, the National Weather Service’s (NWS) forecasters expect much less rain in our area from this system than the one and one-half to three inches that fell with last week’s cool front.

The NWS’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, which issues forecasts for rainfall totals from one to seven days in advance, is forecasting that south Mississippi will receive between one-half and one inch Thursday night through Friday night.

After the cool front passes through on Friday night or Saturday morning, expect another stretch of nice spring weather for the weekend and into early next week.