DOWNLOAD THE APP: Rain, flood concern increase Wednesday evening and Wednesday night

ROANOKE, Va. – Make sure to download our weather app, so you can get warnings within seconds if they’re issued.

After two days of dry weather, the atmosphere is up to its old antics the rest of the week. A system that doused south Florida over the holiday weekend will ride up the East Coast throughout the day Wednesday. As it’s forced inland, it will bring in some heavy rain to our area after about 5 or 6 p.m. Wednesday. Rounds of heavy rain will then continue into the early morning hours, leading to yet another flood threat.

Between 6 and 9 a.m. Thursday, we expect some patches of mist and fog. Otherwise, we’ll reach a lull in the action.

Between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning, however, we expect a widespread half an inch to inch and a half of rain. With how wet the ground is and how heavily the rain will fall at times, we expect flooding to become an issue. Streams, creeks and even some rivers will rise with localized flash flooding possibly leading to a few secondary road closures.

Storms Thursday afternoon will be more hit-or-miss, but they will move slowly. So while not everyone will get wet, a localized flood threat still exists during that time.

Warm, humid air continues to move into the area ahead of a cold front. This spells more showers and storms Friday afternoon and evening. Like Thursday, whatever pops will move slowly and will add to the localized flood threat.

The location of the front will determine who sees storms Saturday. At the moment, that chance is highest east of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Between Wednesday evening and Saturday afternoon, a widespread 1-3″ of rain is forecast (half of that comes late Wednesday to Wednesday night). Isolated higher totals will be possible given the convective (“thunderstormy”) nature of what we’ll be dealing with Thursday afternoon through Saturday afternoon.

Once our cold front passes through, we can breathe a sigh of relief.

In fact, some refreshing air moves in along a gusty wind out of the northwest by Sunday. Low temperatures will even dip into the 40s for some of us come next Monday morning.

With a large area of high pressure anchored over the eastern half of the U.S., the chance for any widespread rain looks low through much of next week. The Climate Prediction Center has taken note of that, putting us under the “drier than average” umbrella during that time.

We’ll just have to see if any clusters of storms can form on the perimeter of that high pressure system. If that were to happen, it would be by next Wednesday.