Wednesday 9 a.m.
A high pressure area along the East Coast will promote dry weather with a warming trend for the Northeast today and tomorrow. A low pressure area and its cold front will proceed eastward from the middle of the country. Our current forecast is for showers and thunderstorms to reach Chicago later this afternoon, Buffalo and Pittsburgh tomorrow morning, then New York City and Philadelphia tomorrow night.
Gusty winds will bring cooler air in behind the cold front, with the greatest cooling around and west of the Great Lakes then later across northern New York and central and northern New England. As the system moves east and south, the cooling effect is likely to be less. Most areas will not experience as much chill as they did early last weekend.
In all areas from the Great Lakes to the Northeast, another warmup is likely as we go into next week. Most computer models show a major trough setting up in the western states and a ridge building into the East. The only way for chilly air to make southward progress in the East with a pattern like this would be for a chilly high pressure area to build in eastern Canada to send chilly air down the coast. The video shows more.
Near the center of a high pressure area, the air sinks and becomes drier. A clear sky like this is the typical result. The mirrorlike windows of our building reflect the clear sky; the trees on the right are actually mirror images of the real ones on the left. I wonder sometimes how dogs react to mirror images. If our dog Sam sees me in front of a mirror, he can see two images of me. Is that confusing? I have asked Sam this a number of times, and he just... ...looks at me.
Note at the bottom of the picture (looking toward the southeast), there are high clouds near the horizon. From satellite pictures, it appears those clouds are 100 miles away.
In the Northeast, a high pressure area now in control will be reinforced by another high from northeastern Canada. In the "what could go wrong?" department, a batch of cloudiness has appeared east of New England and has been spreading southwestward toward the New Jersey coast this morning.
The clouds over parts of the region are starting to break up, a sign that the predicted drier air from the northeast is making progress.
Cloudiness covers a large area. A few pockets of clearing show up where south winds ride downhill from mountains to lowlands. Air warms and dries with descent. Notice clearing downwind (northwest of) the Smoky Mts.
So, there could be more showers at times late next week as forest we can tell. For now we are stumped. But, it is our beleaf that this weekend you will like being outside. I know a dogwood. It may be a little cool for the beech, but you can take your dog for walk in the bark. What about next weekend? Don't ax.
If the pattern turns out damp as suggested by this map for Sunday, it could turn gray and drizzly from D.C. to New York City for early next week. If the high does not move offshore and no disturbance approaches from the west, it would be sunny and warm.
Two things stand out: (1) a warmup this weekend and early next week (the top graph), and (2) the overall dryness for the weekend and early next week. This graph is for Philadelphia.
Elliot Abrams
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