There are a lot of clouds out there this morning and even a few sprinkles of rain. This afternoon we will continue to see the clouds and there is the risk for a pop-up shower or even thunderstorm. Not everyone will get wet and if you do, it shouldn’t last very long.

As I often mention, rainfall in the summer is more scattered in nature and while it’s surprising we haven’t see much rain, it’s certainly not a crisis situation.

The current drought monitor continues to illustrate the driest area of the northeast corner is basically much of eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as eastern Connecticut.

No part of Maine is in a dry area as there have been normal amounts of rainfall most of the summer and that is what is reflected on the map.

This weekend will be a dry weekend as any shower activity of today will be over. Temperatures are not going to be very warm either day. On Saturday the highs will reach the lower 70s inlands, but some coastal beaches may still remain in the upper 60s much of the day.

I’ll be updating the forecast @growingwisdom on Twitter.
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You can see temperatures across the area for Saturday below.
If you are camping this weekend, bring some warm things for the morning, but I don’t think you’ll be too cool once the sun rises and temperatures respond.

Clouds will play a role on that day keeping us from seeing full sunshine. I like using the following map to illustrate cloud cover. This map gives us an idea of the percentage of the sky that will have clouds during the middle of the morning tomorrow.

I think the percentage will be higher earlier, but tend to decrease during the afternoon. The means there will be more sun shine to end the day than to begin.

The sun will go down just about 7:30 this weekend, give or take a few minutes depending on your exact location. The tides are high in the latter half of the morning prior to noon if you’re going to the beach.

Sunday is the better of the two weekend days. There will be more sun shine than the day before. Look at the cloud cover map we saw for tomorrow on Sunday. Notice the percentage of clouds is greatly reduced leaving us with more blue sky.

Temperatures Sunday will be a bit warmer than the day before a result of the air mass modification and the increase in solar energy.

Much of next week continues the dry pattern. There will be some big heat building in the center of the country and we could see a glancing blow from that sometime later next week just prior to Labor Day.

The tropics are a bit more active today, but it’s been a very quiet season so far as many forecasters expected. The latest area of concern is over the Caribbean and is going to be monitored very closely throughout the weekend.

This area, while not yet a named storm will be bringing heavy rain and gusty winds to part of the Bahamas during the next several days. Long-range models continue to keep this area somewhere off the southeast coast next week so stay tuned.