Blog Article
Today's Best Nice Weather: WA and NC Hit Beautiful, AZ Next
September 16 brings Beautiful-tier weather to Washington State and the Carolinas at once, while Arizona and the Intermountain West line up for their turn by Friday as monsoon moisture clears.
Today's the Peak: Washington State and the Carolinas Both Hit Beautiful Before Arizona Gets Its Turn Friday
Some days the nice weather map is scattered and stingy. Today isn't one of those days. A drying ridge is sitting over two completely different parts of the country at once, the inland Pacific Northwest and the central Carolinas, and both are landing in Beautiful territory with near-identical numbers. If you've got outdoor plans today anywhere from Yakima to Fayetteville, you picked a genuinely good one.
The day's top zone: Washington and the Carolinas together
Today's best-scoring zone runs from the northern Rockies and central High Plains through the Pacific Northwest, and it posts a composite score of 85.2 out of 100, the highest raw number anywhere in the country today. Highs are running a mild 71 degrees on average, dewpoints sit near 48, cloud cover is down to 8 percent, and rain chances are essentially zero. Tri-Cities, Yakima, Greenville, Fayetteville, and Florence all hit the max 92.0 score today, with Spokane, Raleigh, Seattle, Missoula, and Olympia close behind in the low 80s. Boise, Eugene, Harrisonburg, Walla Walla, and Wilson all cracked 92 too.
The one thing keeping this zone from climbing all the way to Perfect, the top rung on the scale, is air quality. AQI is a perfectly reasonable 44, but Perfect's gate requires 35 or lower, so that alone rules it out today even with precipitation, sky, and heat-stress sub-scores essentially maxed out. Helena, Montana is the laggard of the group, held to 72.0 by breezier northeast wind and a cooler 63-degree high.
One step down, a broader Nice-tier band stretches from the Mid-Atlantic through the Southeast into the Intermountain West, scoring 80.3 and missing Beautiful by less than two points. Philadelphia and Sumter, South Carolina both sit right at that line, Sumter proving that an 86-degree high can still feel great when the wind stays light and the sky stays mostly clear. Not everyone is included, though. Denver is stuck at 60.4 thanks to 77 percent cloud cover and afternoon storm chances, and Jacksonville is dragged down by a sticky 72-degree dewpoint. That's the trade-off pattern all week: temperature and humidity are rarely the villain right now, cloud cover and moisture are.
If you're near Asheville for the Biltmore Championship starting Thursday, you're sitting right at the edge of this same dry, mild air mass working its way through the Carolinas. It's not in today's extracted city list, but the broader Southeast pattern feeding Raleigh and Fayetteville their 92s is the same system settling into the mountains.
Arizona's moisture clears out by Friday
Here's the more interesting story for anyone with weekend plans out west. Southern and central Arizona are under a Moderate Risk of excessive rainfall today as a Gulf of California shortwave pumps monsoonal moisture into the Southwest, the same feature that's been generating repeated flash flood warnings in slot canyons around Tucson and Flagstaff for days. That's not a nice weather day in the desert right now.
But the WPC discussion is clear that this trough is weakening and sliding east through the week, and the nice weather data backs that up. By Friday, the central Rockies and Intermountain West become the day's best zone, scoring 88.7, with Tucson and Prescott both hitting the 92.0 ceiling and Wenatchee, Washington joining them. Highs run a comfortable 82 degrees with just 4 percent cloud cover and next to no rain. The forecast-day rules cap Friday's outlook at Beautiful rather than Perfect, but the underlying numbers, especially sky and precipitation, are about as clean as this outlook gets.
One asterisk for Friday: a broader Nice-tier swath covering Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Jose, and Seattle scores a strong 79.7, but it's held out of Beautiful purely by an air quality gate, zone-average AQI runs 52 against a 50 ceiling, even though every other sub-score in that zone already clears the higher bar. Worth knowing if you're chasing the absolute best air, not just the best temperatures.
The quiet, longest-running streak in the country
While the coasts trade the spotlight day to day, California's Central Valley just keeps going. Sacramento, Stockton, Elk Grove, Tracy, Manteca, Lodi, and more than a dozen nearby towns are all sitting on 90-day live streaks of Nice-or-better weather, dating back to mid-June. That's not a hot streak, that's a season. And up in north-central Washington, a cluster of small towns, Entiat, Oroville, Tonasket, Loon Lake, and Quincy among them, are rated Nice or better on every single day of this entire seven-day outlook, the most consistent stretch in the whole country right now.
A few caveats before you head out
Central Nevada is under an Elevated fire weather concern both today and Thursday, with dry southwest winds of 15 to 20 mph and relative humidity dropping under 15 percent drying out fuels that have already had a rough stretch. If you're camping or hiking through the Great Basin, that's worth checking before you strike a match or drive over dry grass. Wind is also the quieter limiter in a few of today's lower-scoring zones, Billings and Denver both see gusts near 20 mph that take some of the shine off otherwise mild afternoons. And while today and Friday look great for the regions above, the broader WPC pattern still has repeated rounds of heavy rain targeting the north-central Plains and Missouri Valley, plus a slow-lifting front dragging showers into the Upper Midwest and Ohio Valley through the weekend. Nice weather is real today, it's just not everywhere.
For the full seven-day picture and city-by-city scores, check the Nice Weather outlook page.