Record cold, then record heat?

Is mowing the lawn part of your plans for Tuesday?

If not, you're like me, and we're probably going to regret that decision. We're looking at blast furnace weather across the Carolinas later this week -- on the heels of some unseasonably cool weather.

In fact, we could go from record cold to record warmth in Charlotte over a period of 60 hours.

Almost unbelievably mild high pressure has taken hold of Carolinas weather on Tuesday, bringing much cooler temperatures and very low humidity levels. Skies would be blue, if not for a few areas of cirrus clouds being spun into the region around the circulation of Tropical Storm Debby.

Wednesday morning's low temperature forecast in Charlotte is 55 degrees, and we seem almost certain to break the record for the date -- 59 degrees, set in 1879.

Temperatures will soar quickly Wednesday, climbing into the upper 80s. But with very low humidity, it won't seem intolerable.  So if you didn't get the lawn mowed today, you probably still have Wednesday.

Then it gets ugly. The cool high pressure area will modify by Thursday, and temperatures will keep soaring. We're looking for highs in the middle 90s, but once again with low humidity levels. Then again, 95 degrees is hot -- no matter what the humidity is.

The chance for record highs will come Friday afternoon, when temperatures will climb near the 100-degree mark in Charlotte. The same is likely Saturday. Record highs each day are 102 degrees, set in 1959 (for June 29) and 1945 (for June 30).

High pressure is forecast to weaken slightly Sunday and Monday, but all that means is the high temperature will be in the middle 90s.

There are signs that a slightly cooler air mass might arrive around or slightly before the Fourth of July, but there almost certainly won't be a return to what we experienced Tuesday.

Debby update: Weak tropical system are a real pain to forecast, and Debby was such a system. Originally, meteorologists expected Debby to move westward across the Gulf of Mexico and make landfall in south Texas as a Category 1 hurricane.

Instead, with very little in the way of steering currents and wind shear that disrupted the strengthening process, Debby remained a weak tropical storm and moved northeast. It likely will become a tropical depression later Tuesday, cross the northern Florida peninsula, and then swing out to sea while regaining tropical storm status.

But there's a lesson from Debby. Even as a weak tropical storm, it produced some amazing rainfall totals -- more than 20 inches in parts of Florida. Street flooding and power outages have been common across the Sunshine State.

It's the rainfall and spin-off tornadoes that can make a weak or dying tropical storm so dangerous, and the western Carolinas sometimes are the target of such a system.