We started by looking at satellite imagery of water vapor to get an understanding of what is happening across the regions of our interest and how that might play a role in the coming future. We see a large, large upper depression in the southeast. This has plagued the region since the start of the week, keeping temperatures consistently below normal along with repeated showers and localized storms. We’ll now compare that to the 500mb height sample below, to see what happens over the weekend in the Northeast.
We see a large area of below-average elevation, which is what we’re looking at in the current observational analysis through steam imaging, modeled to shift slowly into the mountains. Appalachian across the Mid-Atlantic before spreading to the Northeast. We know that lows are generally associated with cloudy, cool, and often wet conditions. This will be the case all weekend across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, with even then another upper low early next week.
This pattern will result in several occurrences on the aforementioned areas:
- As mentioned, a model is not stable. The possibility of daily showers and storms, although mostly of mild severity, will cover a large area from today through the end of this week and into next week. On a side note, severe weather could become a more serious problem through the next trough next Monday/Tuesday. However, the main concern will be local flash flooding since the nature of the weak shear force, high PWAT and persistent showers from low above are the main forcing mechanisms.
2. The heat. A large result of both the direction of the chute shaft and where the air is coming from, which is the dew point that will remain consistently high in the 60s and 70s until a final cold front pushes southeast by the middle of next week. Essentially, it will be “air you can wear”, with moisture drawn directly from the Gulf, with tropical moisture characteristics. I mentioned the higher PWAT just above, and this is what I mean because the unusual moisture carried in the air masses will hang around these areas for quite some time.
Now analyzing both temperature and humidity combined into one index – the heat index, we found that on the I-95 corridor, the heat readings exceeded above 70 and hit 80 over the course of the weekend. and next week. Not just this region, but again in the Mid-Atlantic in general and across the entire Northeast.
If there’s any “silver lining,” it’s the fact that across the Ohio Valley all the way to the Northeast, we’re continuing to fall short of rainfall. This is in the last 30 days and doesn’t even count since the beginning of the year so it’s even more obvious. Below is an EPS showing a verbatim spike in rainfall, a much needed amount, dropping this weekend and next as an average over 1” seems likely to occur for a large portion of the population. While it can get in the way of weekend plans, it’s at least helpful to look at it through this angle as we have a lot of fun weekends ahead because technically it’s now Official Summer!
About the author
Armando Salvador
Hello! My name is Armando Salvadore and I am a Mississippi State graduate with a Bachelor of Professional Meteorology and an Activity Meteorologist working in the Private Sector. Stay tuned if you like technical, exotic, and general weather tweets! Also big on long-range forecasting as well! Twitter: @KaptMands
