James Spann forecasts a dry weekend for Alabama from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.

DRY WEATHER CONTINUES: Dry weather is the story for Alabama through the weekend with sunny, warm days and fair, pleasant nights. Highs will remain between 86 and 89 degrees for most places through Sunday, with lows in the 60s.

We won’t see any rain next week as an upper ridge builds across the Deep South. Heat levels rise, with temperatures reaching the mid 90s by the middle of the week — 10 degrees above average for late September in Alabama. We still see no evidence of any high-impact rain event for Alabama or the Deep South for the next seven to 10 days.

FOOTBALL WEATHER: Clear weather is the story for the high school football games across Alabama tonight with temperatures falling into the 70s during the games.

Saturday, Auburn hosts Penn State (2:30 p.m. kickoff) at Jordan-Hare Stadium. The sky will be sunny and the temperature about 87 degrees at kickoff. Alabama will host Louisiana-Monroe  (3 p.m. kickoff) at Bryant-Denny Stadium. It will be sunny and very warm, with temperatures falling from near 88 degrees at kickoff into the low 80s by the final whistle.

UAB is also at home, hosting Georgia Southern at Protective Stadium in downtown Birmingham (2:30 p.m. kickoff). Expect a sunny sky with a kickoff temperature around 87 degrees, falling into the low 80s by the end of the game.

TROPICS: Tropical Storm Fiona, with winds of 50 mph, is about 250 miles east of the Leeward Islands in the Atlantic early this morning. Fiona remains a sheared tropical cyclone. The center of the storm is fully exposed to the west of a large area of deep convection over much of the eastern portion of the circulation. It is expected to remain below hurricane strength over the next five days, and a turn to the north begins early next week near Hispaniola. Most guidance continues to suggest that Fiona will remain east of the contiguous U.S. and is no threat to the Gulf of Mexico.A weak tropical wave is in the eastern Atlantic, but the chance of development is low as it moves northward over open water. The rest of the Atlantic basin is quiet.

ON THIS DATE IN 2004: At 1:50 a.m., Ivan made landfall just west of Gulf Shores as an upper-end Category 3 hurricane. Ivan packed winds of more than 120 mph and a 10- to 15-foot storm surge. The magnitude and extent of the damage and destruction over Baldwin County in Alabama and Escambia and Santa Rosa counties in northwest Florida exceeded that of both Hurricane Frederic (September 1979) and Hurricane Opal (October 1995).

Hurricane Ivan may rival the magnitude of damage and destruction caused by the Hurricane of 1926, which ravaged the counties east of Mobile Bay. Eight deaths in the western Florida Panhandle (seven in Escambia County and one in Santa Rosa County) were the direct result of the storm.

A sailboat anchored in Wolf Bay in Baldwin County recorded a wind gust of 145 mph. Demopolis, more than 100 miles inland, endured wind gusts estimated at 90 mph, while Montgomery saw wind gusts of 60 to 70 mph. At the height of the outages, Alabama Power reported 489,000 subscribers had lost electrical power — roughly half of its subscriber base.

BEACH FORECAST: Click here to see the AlabamaWx Beach Forecast Center page.

For more weather news and information from James Spann and his team, visit AlabamaWx.