Doug Simonian

Morning Roundup: Dry, pleasant weather returns

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Good morning! After many areas received  thunderstorms with heavy downpours — owing to high humidity on Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday looks much more pleasant. A cold front charged through the area yesterday evening straight from the north, helping to advect a truly dry Canadian airmass, rather than one that gets modified in the Midwestern states. This dry air helps temperatures to drop more quickly at night, leading to quite the refreshing morning, while drastically lowering the humidity. This is why you’re feeling much more comfortable this morning than the past several more humid days. 

Despite the relatively chilly airmass, temperatures will still be able to recover to around 80 degrees this afternoon. Dry air leads to larger temperature changes, since it has a smaller heat capacity than water. This means a large range in low and high temperatures (an extreme example to draw upon is deserts having such large temperature ranges). An area of high pressure behind the front will provide a nice stable layer in the atmosphere, preventing any cloud formation. This should keep skies almost 100% clear and blue, with around a 10mph northerly breeze — when combined with dewpoints in the low 50s, it will be one of the most pleasant days of the year. The north wind also halters seabreezes, making today a lovely beach day.

Other weather highlights include:

  • Another chilly night is expected tonight. Clear skies, dry conditions, and diminishing winds will allow suburbs to have radiational cooling. This means that many western suburbs and the pine barrens could fall into the upper 50s, while mid 60s will again be found in Urban areas
  • Friday looks splendid as well. Winds will have shifted to the south and southeast as high pressure scoots offshore. This should make most locations a few degrees warmer than on Thursday. However, the southeast wind flows with the seabreeze, making it chillier and windier along the beaches.
  • A warm front looks to go through the region late on Friday night/early Saturday morning. This could trigger some overnight thunderstorms with loud thunder and heavy rain, but not severe. It will also be ushering in much warmer and humid air from Saturday and onward, when a several-day stretch of upper 80s to low 90s with high humidity is possible.
  • With this warm and humid airmass, the threat of thunderstorms will have to be watched from Saturday through Tuesday — as of now, the two days for severe weather would be on Saturday and Monday. There are a lot of model discrepancies, however, and the latest NAM model has backed off somewhat for Saturday. A more detailed article will be written about these threats if they gain more traction, but as of now there is not enough concrete evidence for severe weather to write one. That being said, while the GFS is too slow to bring us the extreme instability to make Saturday a threat, it does look quite potent for Monday. It’s only a matter of time before one of these events pan out.