Ben Cathey

The chaotic “ring of fire” weather pattern continues through at least the Fourth of July. While helpful showers will ease Minnesota’s drought conditions, they will throw some challenges into planning around outdoor activities this holiday weekend.

We are scorching hot and it’s muggy season across the state. Rain is back later this afternoon in the northwest, then moves south towards Minneapolis and St. Paul near midnight. There are several more rounds of rain ahead and were heating back up next weekend.

There could be a couple of raindrops later Friday into early Saturday but the looming story is the heat next week, especially in our southwestern zones.

Apart from a very few showers in the coming days, the weather story is all about a developing heat wave. Unlike the record dew points and heat indices to start off July, this air mass is drier and a lot less humid. There’s still an intense risk of heat exhaustion but this is not quite as dramatic this time around.

The Arrowhead is having one of its hottest days ever recorded on Monday, with wildfire smoke continuing in the Boundary Waters. There is not much rain relief before at least Friday across the state of Minnesota.

Following the worst day of heat in Boundary Waters history, the air quality from wildfire smoke is worsening. We have your 90s heat forecast plus more on the smoke.

The Particulate Matter 2.5 Index, which measures wildfire smoke, was at 176 in Grand Portage Tuesday morning. That was worse than other spots in southern California and in Colorado where there are active wildfires.

We break up smoke, wind, rain, and temperatures into four sections so you can scroll to what you want to read about.

There are not many solid (nor heavy) rain chances ahead. The slightly lower heat will help with slower evaporation but we do need more rain, ASAP.

To look across all of Minnesota, you may not see a ton of change across the broader Thursday drought report. Drought did expand into the Boundary Waters — not shocking, given the fires.