The Mother’s Day forecast shows days of mild weather remaining in most parts of the country.
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If there’s no storm this weekend, it might be nice to fire up the grill or eat outside on Mother’s Day. It may be a while before many parts of the country see temperatures this good again. Many regions will soon be bidding farewell to the mild days of May and welcoming the heat of summer.
The National Weather Service’s 8- to 14-day outlook shows a ridge moving in from the west that is expected to bring “unseasonably warm” weather to much of the country. The outlook map looks like a large orange-red bullseye centered on Nebraska and ripples across the United States, except for a swath along the East Coast and parts of the Pacific Northwest.
“Heat will intensify across the western United States this weekend and early next week,” the National Weather Service wrote on social media on Friday, May 8. “High temperatures could reach 20 to 30 degrees above normal in some locations. New records for daily high temperatures could be set.”
The weather bureau said some states had an early start to April with summer-like temperatures. Nationally, April 2026 was the warmest April in 20 years and the third warmest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Ohio Valley had its warmest April on record. Eight states in the region (Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia) set statewide records for April.
Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia broke records set in 1896 and exceeded the average temperature for April in the 20th century by 8 degrees. April ranked in the top 10 hottest months among 16 other states.
In general, warmer-than-normal temperatures began earlier this year across much of the United States, with NOAA reporting that average temperatures for the first four months of this year were the warmest in 132 years of record. Its average was 44.8 degrees, almost 6 degrees above the long-term average.
In the short term, showers and thunderstorms are expected across the central and southern plains on Saturday, May 10, and will move further south into the southern Great Plains, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas on Mother’s Day, the weather service said. A cold front is expected to move through the Great Lakes and mid-Atlantic, potentially bringing thunderstorms and damaging winds.
A heat wave moving west is expected to bring well-above-average or record-breaking temperatures, with lows reaching the 100s in the valleys of Southern California and Arizona.
In the longer term, NOAA predicts that El Niño has arrived and will continue through the end of the year, and many weather experts are concerned that temperatures could be even warmer than normal in some regions.
Dinah Boyles Pulver, a national correspondent for USA TODAY, covers climate change, weather, the environment and other news. Contact dpulver@usatoday.com or @dinahvp on Bluesky or dinahvp.77 on X or Signal.
