Unseasonably warm weather is expected for a couple more days with the National Weather Services in Wilmington forecasting record-setting temperatures for the Highland County area on Wednesday and Thursday.

Both Wednesday’s and Thursday’s record high temperatures, which forecasters at the National Weather Service in Wilmington said would most likely be broken, were set 100 years ago, with Oct. 2 topping out at 90 degrees in 1919 and Oct. 3 peaking at 89 that same year.

Meteorologist Scott Hickman told The Times-Gazette the heating trend is due to a strong area of high pressure that has settled across the Ohio Valley.

“This high pressure system is very dry as well, and to complicate things, most of the area of the Ohio Valley has been dry in the last month,” he said. “The combination of those two being very dry, and a very strong high pressure system have been leading to these unseasonable record-breaking temperatures.”

He described the current weather pattern as unusual for this time of the year, attributing it to the fact that when a strong high pressure system is present in the eastern part of the nation, there is usually a corresponding trough of low pressure in the west, which he said gave life to a storm that brought heavy weekend snowfall to the Montana Rockies.

“We have what’s called a very highly amplified upper-level flow pattern,” he said. “That’s why when they had the snow in Montana on the high plains east of the Rockies, high temperatures struggled to get above freezing Tuesday while we were roasting in the 90s.”

Relief is on the horizon Thursday night, Hickman said, when a cold front moves in. The front will cause a more than 20-degree drop in temperatures from Thursday afternoon to Friday afternoon, and a 47-degree difference between Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning’s expected low of 45.

He said the next best chance for rain looks to move in Sunday night/Monday morning, with forecasting models able to give a more accurate prediction of potential rainfall as the weekend gets closer.

Reach Tim Colliver at 937-402-2571.