It’s time for another check-in Dr. Cody Kirkpatrick about the weather on April 8. Given the fluctuating forecasts we’ve seen lately, we asked, “Is it even possible to predict the weather for the eclipse?”
He responded, “This is one of the more challenging forecasts a meteorologist would have to make. The question is pretty much “will it be cloudy during this exact 5 or 10 minutes, exactly at my location, on Monday?” That’s almost impossible to know with complete certainty, here in Indiana. The forecast is even more important because the eclipse is so rare; it’ll be decades before something like this happens again in Indiana.
“But now that we are about 4 to 5 days away, we get a better idea of what the big weather patterns will be. There are signs now that a weather system will move through the Midwest and bring rain showers on Sunday and Sunday night. So we are starting to see the actual forecast question for Monday: if there are still clouds in Illinois and Indiana on Monday morning, how fast will those clouds clear out? Will they be gone in time? Those smaller details are something we’ll have to wait until 1 to 2 days away to have more confidence about. Keep your fingers crossed!”