Quintessential summer day on tap for Peachtree Road Race

This Independence Day will be one for the books, y’all. Metro Atlanta should get picture-perfect summer weather Friday, according to forecasters.

For those who don’t sleep in during the holidays and signed up to run in the 56th edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race, you can expect temperatures in the low to mid-70s when the first wave takes off at 6:50 a.m. By midmorning, temps are expected to reach the mid-80s and rise from there into the 90s.

Lower humidity could help keep runners cooler. Last year, a black flag was issued around 10:40 a.m. because of extreme heat, which meant the last 1,000 or so runners did not have their official results recorded.

Regardless, Friday will be hot, obviously. There is no way around that.

But it should be a drier heat than what we sweltered through late last month during the season’s first heatwave, according to the National Weather Service. There will still be humidity, just not enough to push us into dangerous heat advisory levels.

Highs will be in the low to mid-90s under mostly sunny skies across North Georgia, though temperatures in the higher elevations should be a few degrees cooler, the Weather Service forecasts. The heat index — a measure of how hot it feels — should stay just a few degrees above actual temperatures.