Thursday Evening Update:
As of 11PM Thursday, Potential Tropical Cyclone Sixteen has 40 mph winds. This is tropical storm strength, but it still doesn’t have all the tropical storm characteristics it needs to become a named storm. Over the next 24 hours, this will likely change, and it will be called either Subtropical or Tropical Storm Ophelia.
Ophelia will make landfall in North Carolina, likely somewhere between Wilmington and Cape Hatteras on Saturday morning. Ophelia will quickly strengthen to 60 mph winds before landfall. A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect from the north of Edisto Beach, all the way up the coast to Maryland! If you want to head to the beaches, Saturday or Sunday would be much better than Friday.
Still very little impacts expected for the CSRA. We’ll actually have a good amount of sunshine tomorrow, mostly to the west of Augusta. There could be some light rain showers in our South Carolina counties late Friday night, into the overnight hours of Saturday morning. The majority of the CSRA will be completely dry. Wind gusts could reach up to 25mph at times, but no wind alerts are in effect. Our high on Friday is 80 degrees.
The weekend will be beautiful! We’ll be back to mostly sunny skies and temperatures aren’t budging from the low 80s. Rain chances increase to 20-40% next week with temperatures falling into the upper 70s.
