'Halftime' weather report for April

With Tax Day behind now us, the numbers are in for the first half of April. After a very cool March, we've seen something of a pattern shift and turn-around through the first two weeks of this month.

We haven't swung wildly to the warm side by any means, but as seen in the first image above, we have seen an average temperature at Raleigh-Durham International Airport that is about 2 degrees above the normal (1981-2010) value of 57.7 degrees.

While that is a little on the warm side, it is far from our warmest April 1-15 period, which occurred in 1967 and was 5.7 degrees warmer than this year. The coldest first half of April at RDU so far was in 1961, when the temperature for the period averaged 49.9, a full 9.8 degrees colder than this year.

Our coldest and warmest hourly temperatures for this month so far were a low of 35 on April 2nd, and a high of 85 on the 10th.

Much like the temperature, precipitation for the first two weeks of the month has run a little above normal, with 1.83 inches so far, compared to a normal of 1.58 inches this far into the month. For comparison, the least we'd seen at this point was in 1967 (perhaps connected with the record warm temperature that year), while the most precipitation at this point was a very wet 3.75 inches ten years ago in 2003.

After some fairly warm weather these next 3-4 days, we'll see cooler and less humid air push back into the area this weekend with a Friday night cold frontal passage, and projections from the Climate Prediction Center are leaning toward temperatures averaging cooler than normal overall for the next couple of weeks.