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Pittsburgh Weather: Warm-Up Continues

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- The warm-up continues today with highs near 80 degrees.

Yesterday's high hit 73 degrees and today will be warmer than yesterday.

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(Photo Credit: KDKA Weather Center)

Our skies will be mostly sunny to partly cloudy as well. Winds will be light and out of the east.

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(Photo Credit: KDKA Weather Center)

Looking ahead, the rest of the month is going to be hot.

A ridge of high pressure will stay in place keeping rain chances fairly low.

High pressure also means sinking air which leads to compressional heating.

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(Photo Credit: KDKA Weather Center)

I always say that oftentimes the things that lead to short term cold air during the winter also plays a role in long term cold weather sticking around. One example is snow on the ground.

Snow is bright and has a high albedo (high reflectivity or a fancy way of saying it's bright to the human eye).

The high reflectivity of snow actually ensures cold air stays in place since the sun's rays shoot back off the snow and don't absorb into the ground where they help to heat us up.

The same can be said for hot air.

The things that lead to short term heating also do a lot of work in trying to keep us hot.

I think one of the things to watch is going to be how much rain we see over the next two weeks.

High pressure generally keeps away most types of rain.

Big organized systems steer around high pressure in most cases.

This leads to isolated to scattered storm days with spot areas getting downpours.

At this point we are just slightly behind the monthly average when it comes to rain for the month, but we may get little in the way of rain from here to the end of the month.

Little rain means very low soil moisture that again could help to feed into this hot spell sticking around well into June.

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(Photo Credit: KDKA Weather Center)

The past two months have seen plenty of extreme surface temperatures with a high number of days seeing highs or lows more than 10 degrees off of the average temperature.

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(Photo Credit: KDKA Weather Center)

Does it continue into June?

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