Will thunderstorms help or hinder Central Oregon Fires?

[00:00:00]Alert weather tonight with chief meteorologist Holden La Croix.

[00:00:03]>> Welcome back. Pretty active day today.

[00:00:05]We had some thunder showers develop as early as this morning for areas like Florence and Corvallis, Philomath. That has since kind of dissipated and most of the activity is up into the Cascades. As we take a live look toward downtown Eugene, a little bit cooler today. The cloud cover kind of keeping the temperatures down just a smidge. There's Corvallis right there sitting in about 80°. Again, just toward the e Excuse me, west out toward the Philomath area. We managed to pick up about a quarter of an inch of rain from two or three thunderstorms that kind of passed over the region. Most of the activity has kind of been focused on the Coast Range, but now it's the Cascades and some promising news. The Akawana Butte fire, we have heavy rain headed toward that direction. Again, right now we are seeing some insane fire behavior kind of ahead of that thunderstorm. It's about 20,000 acres burning just north of Sisters and some of the worst fire conditions that we have seen so far are occurring right now. But luckily, we do have some heavy rainfall. I just checked trip check cameras down south of this and it does look like heavy rain is falling on the roadway just south of Sisters, but it's just a matter of time as this approaches the Akawana Butte area. And again, this is what prompted the severe thunderstorm warning out toward eastern Lane County. Not much rainfall for us, but a lot of the activity is kind of focusing right in that area of central Oregon. So, you can kind of see the remnants of that tropical storm still sitting offshore and a lot of that moisture is what's causing these thunderstorms in the first place and kind of a boundary of some very moist air right across areas of McMinnville all the way down toward the Bend area and that's kind of where we're seeing the most activity right now. All right, so when does activity calm? It looks like it's going to be toward tomorrow morning. And again, the big question is did the thunderstorms help or hinder? We're going to have to wait and see for tomorrow, but as of right now, some heavy rainfall is falling on some of those biggest fires. And then, regardless, we see a major cool down, humidity recovers, and temperatures are back into the 50s in the morning for the weekend. So, we'll have to wait and see what actually entails for the day tomorrow, but scattered showers and storms still continue out toward Central Oregon through about 7:00 9:00 tonight, even toward midnight. You can see a little bit of those kind of sneaking into the Willamette Valley by 6:00 tomorrow morning. So, if you're headed north, maybe a few rumbles of thunder for the North Valley, but you can see it's mainly cloud cover. A little bit cooler in Eugene just for reference. We only dipped about 70° in Eugene tonight.

[00:02:22]Tomorrow, we actually cool back down into the 60s. Eventually tomorrow afternoon, the sunshine returns, clear skies, and even staying shy of just about 90° in Bend. So, our afternoon temperatures are dramatically cooling.

[00:02:34]You can see below average temperatures on Saturday and Sunday, immediately followed by some near average weather.

[00:02:39]But notice no above average temperatures expected for the next 7 days. A little bit of relief as opposed to yesterday.

[00:02:46]For the Oregon coast, after some thunder showers this morning, cloudy and cool.

[00:02:50]Notice Friday and Saturday struggling to get out of the 50s for the coastline.

[00:02:54]And eventually the sunshine returns, and you can see you're back close to near 70° next Wednesday. For the Cascades, thunderstorms are done. It is clear and cool temperatures likely dipping back into the 40s as we head into the weekend. So, it's all a matter of how much rain falls on these fires. But across the Umpqua, 87° across Thursday.

[00:03:14]By the time we head toward next Wednesday, temperatures do rebound back to 88. For the Willamette Valley, check this out. Not a single 90° on the 7-day forecast. Overnight lows will get back into the 50s.