Most of Texas and Louisiana should reach the 80s on Monday, November 2, per meteorologist Timothy McGill’s Meteored outlook issued November 1. Afternoon highs from Texas to Minnesota are forecast to run as much as 10 to 20-plus degrees above average, and the 70s extend north to Missouri and Kansas. Monday’s readings are forecast values, not observations, and the margin above the seasonal average is the point of the outlook.
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Warmth on that scale rarely arrives alone. McGill tied it to a cold front moving from the central into the eastern United States early in the week, with thunderstorms, flash-flood risk and mountain snow all part of the same pattern. The forecast covers Monday and Tuesday in detail, naming the Gulf Coast, the Tennessee and Ohio valleys, the Great Lakes and the Northeast as the regions that inherit the warmth on the second day, and treats the weekend that follows as a cooling-off period for parts of the Midwest.
Monday’s warm corridor from Texas to Minnesota
The anomaly is widest on Monday. McGill’s forecast article puts the afternoon departures from average at 10 to 20 degrees or more across a corridor stretching from the Texas Gulf Coast plains to the Minnesota border. The 80s are concentrated in Texas and Louisiana, while the 70s reach Missouri and Kansas, which means communities hundreds of miles apart share unusually mild afternoons. A departure of 20 degrees is large enough that outdoor plans, energy demand for cooling and the first wave of fall allergies can all shift, though the sources address only temperatures.
Tuesday: the warmth shifts east
By Tuesday, November 3, the warm air shifts east across the Gulf Coast, the Tennessee and Ohio valleys, the Great Lakes and the Northeast. The 70s reach northern Illinois and southern lower Michigan, Indianapolis warms well into the 70s, and most of Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida climb into the 80s. The National Weather Service’s Indianapolis weather story gives a compatible picture, saying highs there would generally be in the 70s this week before cooling off next weekend.
The Indianapolis page has caveats. It describes pleasant weather through Tuesday and several storm systems moving in from Wednesday through early in the weekend, but it gives no exact daily highs and its metadata suggests it may not have been refreshed recently. Treat it as support for the pattern rather than a precise forecast for any one afternoon.
The cold front that ends the warm spell
Heat in the Plains and Gulf states in November is usually a prelude. The front driving the warmth also drives storms. The Weather Prediction Center’s excessive rainfall outlook has a Day 1 issuance from 1529 UTC on November 1 with about 21.2 million people in a slight risk of flash flooding rain and about 41.6 million in marginal, and Meteored tallies nearly 48 million residents of 17 or more states exposed to flash-flood danger into early Tuesday. Severe thunderstorms are possible on the front’s southern end on Monday, as laid out on the Storm Prediction Center’s Day 2 outlook page.
Florida shows how heat and rain coexist. The Melbourne office’s forecast page called for increasing rain chances Sunday and Monday, with heavier localized totals possibly causing flooding, and hazardous beach conditions through at least Tuesday. Warm Atlantic-side air and tropical moisture produce an 80-degree day with a flood risk, the opposite of the dry, sunny image that Monday’s highs might suggest.
The warm side of the pattern has a cold side. While Texas and Louisiana bask, the Weather Service in Grand Junction had a winter storm warning in effect through noon Monday for Colorado’s San Juan Mountains in the southwest, where a foot to a foot and a half of snow (12 to 18 inches) is forecast above 10,000 feet. The gap between an 80-degree afternoon on the Gulf plains and heavy mountain snow a few states west comes from one early-week pattern, which Meteored’s roundup covers from the Rockies snow to the southern warmth.
Later in the week: a West Coast system and a cooldown
Meteored’s outlook turns west after Tuesday. A West Coast system arrives Thursday and Friday with snow-prone conditions at high elevations in the Pacific Northwest and the Intermountain West, plus moderate to heavy rain to lower elevations in the northwest corner of the country. In the Midwest, the Indianapolis office’s wording about cooling off next weekend suggests the warm spell is brief.
Questions remain about the size of the departures. McGill’s forecast gives ranges rather than city-by-city highs, and the Indianapolis page gives no normals, so the actual number of degrees above average at any given airport will be known only after the daily observations are logged. Whether any location sets a record high for the date is a separate matter that the sources do not address, and the Weather Prediction Center and Storm Prediction Center products cited here concern rain and storms rather than temperature records.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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