A near-normal Valentine's Day...

We're coming up on what looks to be a very nice Valentine's Day tomorrow, and for the time being it appears it will be very typical, at least in terms of coming reasonably close to the "normal" temperature conditions for the day.

High pressure southwest of us should bring a lot of sunshine and dry weather, with low humidity, so there aren't any precipitation issues to deal with, and our current forecast low of 35 and high of 57 aren't far at all from the normal values of 34 and 55.

As a reminder, those normal temperatures are based on the average low and high temperature values over the 30-year period ending with the most recent "zero" year, so the period 1981-2010 for now.

Of course, not every Valentine's Day falls so close to that typical range, and we looked up a few of the extremes for the Raleigh area for February 14th, as seen in the attached image. These are based on records contained in a so-called "Threadex" data set that concatenates observations from different sites around Raleigh to stretch the period of record back to 1887.

In that time, the highest temperature recorded on Valentine's Day was 78 in 1989, while our coldest high was 27 degrees in 1916. We've had as much as 2.3" of rain on our rainiest February 14th (in 1922) and the most snow that has fallen on that date was 6 inches that occurred in 1913.

In addition to the numbers above, our coldest low temperature on Valentine's was a frigid -2 degrees in 1899, and our warmest low temperature was 53 in 1959.

After our fairly normal Thursday, we'll see temperatures warm a bit Friday just ahead of a colder airmass that shifts into the region for the weekend, and then warm back up early next week as some showers develop by Tuesday.

The weekend looks mainly dry at this point, although a couple of passing disturbances could still conceivably squeeze out a few sprinkles Friday night, with a slim chance of a flurry or two in spots late Saturday or Saturday night.