Welcome to the weather blog - a regular Monday through Friday discussion of the weather! While the discussions usually will only come on days I'm working, I'll issue special updates when the weather warrants. I will always post to let you know when no discussion is expected if I'm away on vacation, etc. - if no update is here and no info is available, that likely means the server has temporarily gone on the fritz and I will update as soon as technically possible. You'll find a quick weather synopsis linked to the daily forecast at the top of the page, a general non-technical weather summary below, and when available (most days) a detailed technical meteorological discussion will follow by mid-afternoon. My email is contact@mattnoyes.net. This blog is for you, so I hope you enjoy it! -Matt Noyes
General Weather Summary:
A well-defined cold front will bring noticeable changes to New England overnight Wednesday night, and this front will be a thorn in the side of forecasters through the weekend. The challenge over the next several days will be accurately timing each disturbance aloft, and the placement of the aforementioned front, which will focus precipitation from each passing disturbance.
After a comfortable start Wednesday morning, dry air associated with a bubble of high pressure moving over New England rebounded quickly with the help of ample sunshine. Throughout our Wednesday, a light southwest wind will continue to combine with sunshine to boost temperatures into the 80s for most locales. The exception to this rule is across northwest and northern Maine, where the first in what will be a parade of energetic disturbances aloft has already begun its march across the state, producing areas of rain and downpours, with a chance of thunder late in the day. Though only the northern half of the Pine Tree State will see these showers, it is indeed a sign of change that will descend across the remainder of New England heading into Thursday.
In fact, as mentioned yesterday, the overall pattern for the upcoming week will take on great interest for weather enthusiasts, as New England will straddle the boundary between cool Canadian air and deeper summer warmth streaming up the Eastern Seaboard. Of course, located several thousand feet in elevation above this atmospheric battlezone is the fast corridor of wind that steers our storms and also acts as a thermostat for the atmosphere, separating cool air to the north and warm air to the south. In this corridor of fast-moving wind we find several energetic disturbances racing across the southern tier of Canada, sparking large areas of showers and thunderstorms and a ribbon of clouds stretched from Central to Eastern parts of Southern Canada, evident on satellite imagery. As each of these disturbances marches east, the counter-clockwise flow around them tugs cool air farther south, with a rather formidable shot of cool air that's been settling south over the last 36 hours across Hudson Bay and Central Canada. Wednesday evening and night, the leading edge of this cool air will continue settling south through New England, carrying showers southward from the far North Country, though these showers will lose a good amount of their intensity as the air cools a bit overnight Wednesday night, providing less fuel for the downpours and thunderstorms, allowing them to diminish greatly.
This front will take center stage on Thursday, serving as a remarkable boundary between airmasses, and the impetus for strong and potentially damaging thunderstorms Thursday afternoon. As high pressure builds across Eastern Canada, the clockwise flow of air around that fair weather cell chock full of cool air will send an east wind pinwheeling into Eastern New England, locking high temperatures in the 60s for Maine, most of New Hampshire and even into Eastern Massachusetts, where cool ocean waters will influence the already cooled airmass. Farther west, however, from the Champlain Valley of Vermont to the Pioneer Valley and Lower Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts and Connecticut, points west, temperatures will reach or exceed the 80 degree mark, even nearing 90 in Southwest Connecticut, and that building warmth will be available fuel for thunderstorms to develop Thursday afternoon along the aforementioned cold front, aided by yet another disturbance aloft. Any of the storms that take shape could certainly end up producing damaging winds in the Southwestern quarter and extreme western border of New England Thursday afternoon.
From Thursday evening all the way through the weekend, the placement of that very same front will be the key to the forecast. The front won't go much farther south and west than the Hudson River Valley of Eastern New York Thursday night, then will snap back north and east on Friday in response to a strengthening southwest flow around a large high pressure cell centered off the Carolina coastline. As the clockwise flow of air around that high pressure cell shoots warmth back toward New England, a period of rain would be possible in the clash of airmasses over especially Central and Northern New England Thursday night into Friday morning, with breaks of sun more likely between clouds Friday afternoon as the warmth once again regains its footing across New England. Temperatures will respond to this combination of returning warmth and limited sunshine, rising at least into the 70s and perhaps even warmer if enough sun breaks out. Of course, this returning warmth will also help to fire thunderstorms Friday afternoon, especially given the active jet stream that will be sending a parade of energetic disturbances over our heads.
My hope is that this means deeper warmth would continue its return on Saturday with a blend of sun and clouds before another moderate strength upper level disturbance would regenerate showers, thunder and pockets of rain late Saturday through Saturday night. Feeding off the clash of northern cool and southern warmth, and with increasing moisture pumping northward from the Gulf of Mexico where midweek rains will have some input to this moist flow, rain may fall heavily Saturday night. This disturbance, and its associated moisture, should be transient enough to allow morning rains early Sunday to give way to breaks of sun before scattered showers and thunder crop up in the afternoon and evening. Overall, therefore, I'm not expecting a washout of a weekend, and I'm actually quite hopeful that, provided folks plan around the raindrops, a decent amount of fun and work can both be accomplished outside this weekend. By early next week, a steady supply of moisture would still be available to New England out of the Gulf of Mexico, and the atmospheric pattern is conducive for soaking rains, but a determining factor will be exactly where that abundant moisture is directed, and whether it's focused over us early next week.
Part of the uncertainty in that scenario is that the moisture will be largely a product of a tropical wave located just west of the western tip of Cuba as of this writing. That wave has been generating pulsing thunderstorms the past few days, and this moisture will begin organizing, streaming north into the Eastern Gulf Coast. Though it remains to be seen whether this tropical wave can organize quickly enough to be classified as a tropical system, it does bear watching, and should produce gusty winds for the Eastern Gulf Coast, regardless, as it interacts with the large high pressure cell off the Carolinas, and the difference in barometric pressure allows a corridor of strong wind to develop over Florida. The copious amount of moisture may be too much of what the doctor ordered for the extreme Southeastern United States, as the severe drought conditions and raging wildfires require rainfall, but several inches in 24 hours would be too much, too fast, and flooding is a potential. That same moisture is what I'll be watching for right here at home early next week, to see how it will play out as it becomes caught in the deep southerly wind flow pointing up the Eastern Seaboard.
Have a great day.
Technical Discussion: None today.
Matt
