Raleigh, NC weather
Right now 75°, mostly clear · today 81° / 62°, thunderstorm · seven days from the National Weather Service
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Right now · 75° · mostly clear · wind NE 11 mph · 2° cooler than this time yesterday · at Raleigh-Durham, 10:20 AM
Today, in the Weather Service’s words
A chance of rain between 10am and 2pm, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy. High near 81, with temperatures falling to around 75 in the afternoon. Northeast wind 6 to 9 mph. Chance of precipitation is 50%. New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch possible.
Seven days
Winter in Raleigh
Raleigh averages 5 inches of snow a year, according to NOAA’s 1991-2020 climate normals - a rare snow place. Snow is unusual here. An inch is enough to close schools because almost nothing is set up to clear it.
That is why local snowfall thresholds differ so much from one town to the next: a district that plans for 5 inches a year is equipped differently from one that never sees any. Here, roughly 1 inches in a single storm is where a normal school day comes under threat.
Upper air over Raleigh
The nearest radiosonde launch is Greensboro, about 77 miles away. A weather balloon goes up twice a day and measures temperature, humidity and wind all the way through the atmosphere - which is what forecasters actually read to judge whether storms will fire, and how a surface forecast was arrived at.
Sources: National Weather Service forecast and hourly grid for Raleigh (api.weather.gov), updated Sat, 12:44 PM UTC. Sunrise and sunset from NOAA’s solar position calculations. Snowfall normals from NOAA’s 1991-2020 US Climate Normals. County lines from the US Census Bureau.