Monday midday forecast: Sunny Memorial Day afternoon in Chicagoland, temps still cooler than normal

If you’re planning outdoor activities around Chicagoland for Memorial Day afternoon, you’re looking at ideal dry and sunny conditions.

But make sure to have warmer clothes, especially if you’re near Lake Michigan.

Temperatures will remain on the cool side Monday, with highs in some locations about 10 degrees below average.

You’ll find the warmest temps in areas to the south and west of Chicago, where highs may reach the low 70s. But further north, highs will stay in the mid-60s, even as low as the upper 50s close to the lake.

Winds will remain mostly calm but will stay out of the northeast, creating the cooler lakeside temps.

We’ll also plenty of sunshine around Chicagoland for Memorial Day, at least for a while. Cloud cover will increase later, thickening up around dinnertime.

Tuesday and Wednesday look to remain cool, with a low-pressure center bringing the potential for rain and soggy conditions Tuesday evening into Wednesday.

Then, finally, by the end of the week temps look to climb back toward seasonal averages (see more below).

This current stretch of unseasonably cool weather for Chicagoland continues into a ninth consecutive day Monday, but it’s going to break soon.

The average high temp is in the mid-70s for this part of late May, but as you can see, we’ve been well below that since the start of last week (numbers are through this past Sunday):

We did have some warmth this month, but it was quite fleeting.

We hit our first 90-degree temp on May 15, which feels like a long time ago now. On our scorecard of temps of 80 degrees or warmer, we’ve racked up only a handful so far at O’Hare International Airport and a few more at Midway International Airport.

But for those yearning for more summer-like conditions, we have good news: Warm air is on the way!

Things look to take a turn toward at least seasonally average temps as we wrap up May and start June. Then things look to creep even above average for the first part of June, at least according to long-term forecast models at the moment.

June, the first of our summer months, shows average daily highs at O’Hare beginning in the mid-70s and elevating all the way into the mid-80s by the end of the month.

So even though it hasn’t felt like it lately, summer is coming.

That also means more sunlight, as we head into the longest days of the year around Chicagoland.

It’s dry out there

Temperatures aside, we could definitely use rain in Chicagoland, because lack of rainfall has been an issue this month.

May is typically our wettest month of the year, with about 4 1/2 inches of rain on average, but we’re way behind on that amount. Since Jan. 1, we’re down by 4 inches of precipitation overall, and some of that has to do with our lack of snowfall this past winter.

But we’ve also had a dry May, with only an inch of precipitation during a month when we usually get more than 4 inches of rain.

The dry weather really showed up this month in a visual way that we rarely see around here, too.

It was just over a week ago now that strong southerly winds picked up a lot of dirt from not-yet-planted fields in central Illinois and hurled it toward Chicagoland in 60-mph gusts as a dark wall of dust.

Dust storms are something we see more often downstate or out in more arid parts of the western U.S. The last time we had a big dust storm in Chicago was more than 30 years ago, and our biggest ever was part of the “Dust Bowl” atmospheric phenomena in the 1930s, almost a century ago.

But the event that happened a week ago last Friday was the first-ever Dust Storm Warning issued for the City of Chicago.

Not surprisingly, all of Chicagoland is under some form of drought at the moment. The USDA’s Drought Monitor, released every Thursday, places most of us in the area considered “abnormally dry” to “moderate drought.”

But there are far worse drought conditions on the Great Plains as we get deeper into planting season.

Water temps on the rise

Lake Michigan water temps are on the rise as we approach summer, but they’re still very chilly.

Last weekend, we had our first 60-degree water temp along the Chicago shoreline so far this year. Since then, we’ve backed those temps off into the mid-50s.

The water is still dangerously cold. Water colder than 70 degrees can zap a swimmer’s energy very rapidly.

7-day forecast

The first part of the week will stay cool, but we’re looking at an uptick by the end of the week and into next weekend, when temps look to hit more seasonal averages as we get into June.