By ANGIE HAFLICH

ahaflich@gctelegram.com

Temperatures are expected to drop below the freezing mark tonight into Sunday morning, slightly earlier in the month than normal.

"The lowest temperature we're expecting for Garden City is Sunday morning. We'll be looking at lows around 27 degrees," Kelly Sugden, meteorologist at the Dodge City National Weather Service, said. "The average freeze date for Garden City is around the 12th of October, so it is earlier than normal."

Sugden said that no chance of snow is expected with the cold front.

"We'll probably just see some clouds continuing and a pretty dry atmosphere, so we're not expecting any snow," he said.

Sugden said that the average amount of snow for October is 0.3 inches.

"It's still a little early for snow and it's very infrequent in October," he said. "It steps up to 1.8 inches in November. It really picks up in November and December."

After a chilly evening and Sunday morning, Sugden said that there will be a warm up.

"Basically, next week will be mid- to upper-60s, 65 to 70 degrees. The warmest day looks to be Thursday, when we could see a bit of a warm downslope wind, so that could push us into the lower- to mid-70s," he said.

While the forecast beyond Thursday is difficult to predict accurately at this point, Sugden said that another cold front may move in again next weekend.

"This is uncertain because we're basically looking at a week out, but the models are showing a fairly significant cold front coming through on late Thursday night into early Friday morning, a week from now," he said. "This shows some precipitation and cloud cover associated with that boundary, so it only keeps highs next Friday into the upper 40s to lower 50s. So kind of like what we're going to see (today)."

He said that the precipitation associated with that cold front could bring thunderstorms with it, but that it is too early to predict for certain.

As far as precipitation for September, the total for Garden City ended up at 1.57 inches, 0.10 inches above September's average.

He said that the next three months into January tend to be the drier months of the year.

"The average precipitation, the lowest is in January, but it is on a downward trend now," he said. "So the drought is expected to continue."

He said that precipitation since Jan. 1, is 11.73 inches, 5.65 inches below normal.

"The normal is 17.38 so that's a huge deficit," he said.