As local residents, visitors and businesses make plans for the upcoming total solar eclipse in southern Illinois, planning for the weather this April figures to be much more problematic than the August 2017 event.
The National Weather Service in Paducah is out with with a climatology report for the date of the eclipse on April 8.
In Carbondale, the daytime high falls somewhere between 50 and 79 degrees three out of every four years.
Over the past ten years, the temperature range in Carbondale is even wider with the warmest day reaching 86 in 2020 and the coldest hitting just 42 in both 2018 and 2022.
The average high over the last decade comes in at 64 degrees.
Even more important for eclipse viewers, cloud cover on April 8 in Carbondale reaches at least 60 percent one-third of the time.
Forecasters add April is one of the most active months for severe thunderstorms, but chances of severe weather on any given day is still rather low.
