Meteorologist Kristy Steward's First Warning Forecast
Happy New Year! What an exceptionally warm start to 2022 we had! You don't usually think of New Year's Day as being the perfect beach day, but today certainly was. We had record-breaking warmth in a handful of locations with Virginia Beach even touching 80 degrees. Norfolk’s 75° record set in 1985 was beaten by one degree today with an official reported high of 76°. Elizabeth City broke their 75° record set in 2019 with a high of 77°. Wakefield also broke their previous record of 73° set in 2005 with a high of 77°. The most impressive record-breaking warmth was for Emporia. Its 68° record from 1993 was shattered today as temperatures soared to 76° there. Warm and breezy was certainly the name of the game today. But, of course, this warmth can't last forever. A strong cold front will knock us back into winter soon.
Tonight stays warm and windy. Lows in the low to mid 60s. Mostly cloudy and mostly dry through much of the night. Rain really starts to move in around sunrise Sunday and will last throughout much of the day. Possibly a brief dry break for a few hours Sunday afternoon/evening, right now it looks like from 4-9PM. At times, we could even have thunderstorms pop-up. Sunday evening, the cold front will pass through and rapidly drop temperatures down into the 30s. This also means Monday morning we could see a changeover from rain to snow. At this time, it doesn't look like we'll see any snow accumulations though. The ground will be too warm and the winds too strong for anything to really stick.
Monday afternoon, we dry out and clouds quickly clear, but temperatures continue to gradually drop all day. That means our highs in the upper 30s will be reached Monday morning and we'll end the day in the low 30s to upper 20s. Wind chill values will be about 10° cooler than the air temperature all day.
Temperatures gradually rebound throughout the workweek. Highs in the mid 40s Tuesday climb to the mid 50s for Wednesday and Thursday. Then another cold front knocks temperatures back down into the upper 40s Friday and low 40s next Saturday. With this second cold front later in the week, clouds increase Wednesday into Thursday and scattered showers are possible Thursday night into Friday morning.
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