Friday was a beautiful day but it started cool with 57 degrees in Jamestown and 58 degrees in Cumberland County. Saturday is going to be another lovely day with sunshine and temperatures from the upper 80s to low 90s around East Tennessee. Sunday is going to be partly cloudy and hot with a slight chance of an afternoon shower. Things pick up next week with a daily 50% threat of afternoon and evening thunderstorms and I imagine some of those will be heavy with lots of lightning due to our heat and humidity that we will have.

Storms this time of year produce lots of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes and while it can be lots of fun to watch the electrical display of a distant thunderstorm, it can be dangerous if you get up close and personal. 12 people have been killed across the country by lightning this summer. six were camping or fishing, three were walking or hiking, one riding a motorcycle and two working on a roof. No one has been killed in Tennessee this year but there were three deaths in 2018, two were mowing the lawn and one was under a tree. While there is some risk to talking on the phone or taking a shower during a storm, you see that all of the fatalities in the past couple of years have been people that were involved in outdoor activities. If you can hear thunder then it is close enough to strike. Count the number of seconds between a flash of lightning and the Thunder and divide by 5. This gives you the distance in miles to the lightning strike. If you count to 10 then the storm is only 2 miles away.