A cloudy and rainy day is expected for Monday, and we’ll see cooler temps for the start of this week as well. Normal high is in the upper 70s, and we’ll be about ten degrees cooler than that for Mon/Tue/Wed. Sunshine returns by Wednesday afternoon and stays with us for most of the rest of the week as temps bounce back to the very pleasant mid to upper 70s. 

Tracking the tropics—it looks like Hurricane Lee will pass north of Puerto Rico and take a swipe at Bermuda—but landfall looks most likely at this point in the maritime provinces of eastern Canada next weekend. 

WGN Weekly Climate Report: Chicago started off September as it often does—with  a string of warmer than normal temps

Warmest day we’ve seen so far this month was a triple tie of 94 degrees. A taste of fall on the 8th with our coolest afternoon in three months with a high of only 68. 

After a very dry end to August and dry start to September we saw some heavy rain in spots on Wednesday only in some locales where a few inches fell– and it was followed on Thu/Fri by light lake effect showers that were enough to put 0.11″ in the rain gauge at O’Hare. Many other areas have yet to see any rainfall at all yet this month. A slow moving cold front should help with that with everyone getting some rain on Monday. 

With the dry streak of days recently, it put much of Chicagoland back into the “Abnormally dry” category in the Drought Monitor put out weekly by the USDA

Some areas of Moderate to Severe have crept back into northern Illinois– and even a small sliver of Extreme drought too. It’s still much better than places to our north and west that have conditions much worse. 

Chicago’s 90-degree days this season

So far this season we’ve seen roughly the typical number of days of 90 degrees or warmer and while we still could see that kind of heat ahead— it doesn’t look likely for this coming week. 

The week ahead we’ll see a few benchmarks of shorter days– our last sunrise before 6:30a and our last sunset at or after 7p happens next Saturday. Signs of the shift to astrnomical autumn that happens on the 23rd when the whole planet sees equal amounts of day and night.