With the largest celestial event to occur in the Spa City less than a week away, forecasters predict the weather outlook is not as sunny as people hoped.
Tabitha Clarke, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock, said Monday afternoon that Hot Springs has a 50% chance of "favorable viewing conditions" for the April 8 eclipse.
"This far out, we can really just look at the large-scale features as far as the weather prediction," she said. "There is going to be a storm system that is going to be in the southwest United States during the day of the eclipse, so that's what everyone's kind of focused on, and that's what would bring the dreaded cloud coverage.
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"So, right now, we're just showcasing trends of what might be cloudy and what might not be, but it's going to be an every day look at it and see if the system will shift a little bit and provide a better chance for viewing."
Hot Springs currently sits on the edge of where meteorologists forecast clouds to be heaviest, but Clarke said that can change as the day approaches.
"You're kind of on the edge of if it's not cloudy, where you are, it's going to be cloudy a few counties over, so you're kind of on the edge of where we're looking at some cloud cover," she said. "Of course, this could change, but unfortunately, as of right now, you look like you're going to be under the cloud cover during that part in the middle of the day."
Northwest Arkansas, which is just outside the path of totality, will likely be most affected by the cloud cover, but the prediction shows improvement the farther south and east forecasters look.
"It looks like if you go further northwest, like Tulsa, northwest Arkansas, they're gonna have a lot of cloud cover," Clarke said. "And then the cloud cover kind of starts maybe diminishing the further south and east you go of that. So for Hot Springs, you're kind of on the edge.
"The next few days things could shift farther north, and if they did, you might have a perfectly good viewing area. But unfortunately, this is spring, so there's going to be a storm system kind of in this part of the country, and we'll have to kind of watch how that trends over the next few days."
Clarke said weather predictions become more firm "around three days" from the date.
"We put up weather balloons, and once it starts to kind of sample that upper air network, these systems when they kind of move in, we can kind of get a better idea of which way they're tracking," she said.
"So right around three days things become a little bit more certain. Beyond that, they're really kind of looking at climatology and mixing that in with what the model thinks is going to happen, based off of what's going on."