A beautiful start to the week, but all is not perfect in the land of weather this morning as storminess looms off the east coast of Georgia and will likely turn into the season’s first tropical storm and then a hurricane sometime this week. As we all know weather has now become a play by play game for the media to volley around to attract viewers. If this does turn into a hurricane there will be all sorts of prognostications and bloviating about what it could do and why it’s formed etc. Some of the hype might be justified, but it’s going to be important to pull out fact from fiction and reality from fantasy.

The National Hurricane Center is giving up to an 80% chance the area off the southeast coast is going to develop into a named storm. I took a screen shot of the discussion from the site and you can read it below.

Hurricanes are real and can do a lot of damage. Even a tropical storm like Irene a few years ago can cause big problems. The good news for us here in New England is that even if this storm does form into Arthur, it appears it will remain south and east of New England. That doesn’t mean the effects to our area will be zero and I’ll discuss that possibility further into this entry.

Storms can ravage an area like the outer banks of North Carolina while just bringing some big surf to the coast of Cape Cod. It is of course all about the track any storm ultimately takes and this is based on how the atmosphere sets up to carry the storm.

This week, increasing humidity and heat will be the major pieces of the forecast with the combination of the two making it feel in the 90s for many of us through Wednesday and perhaps Thursday.


I’ll be updating the forecast @growingwisdom on Twitter.
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Thunderstorms will enter the forecast Wednesday afternoon and continue their through Friday. As you know, this doesn’t mean rain for three days, just the opportunity for them during this time period. The most likely time of showers would be in the afternoon Wednesday and Thursday and possibly Friday.

The overall pattern is setting up this way this week. First we have high pressure pumping warm and humid air into the region. This continues the first half of the week. Then a cold front approaches on Thursday. This front will provide showers and storms as it nears the area. Once the front passes offshore, the weather clears and we return to drier and more comfortable air for next weekend. Many of you will hit 90F multiple times this week especially Tuesday and Wednesday.

The wild card in this forecast is going to be the tropical system which will likely become Arthur. When you have a cold front approaching form the west and an offshore tropical system the tropical moisture can sometimes be pulled northward. While the wind and most severe part of the storm still stay well out to sea, the rain can be sucked north and give us tremendous amount of water in a short period of time. This is certainly a possibility I’ll be watching for this week.

Water temperatures are running very warm south of New England and are approaching August levels already.

On the other side of the coin, the front could push far enough south Friday morning to clear us out and leave most of the 4th warm and dry. The map below shows the basic set-up for 8PM on July 4th. Movement of any of the players 50 or 100 miles in any direction will impact what type of weather we have.

Obviously, the forecast for the 4th of July is crucial for so many activities. I don’t feel comfortable leaning either way 5 days before as too much can change. It’s really a toss of the coin at this point as to how Friday’s weather turns out.

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