Just a Formality? Summer Ends Monday Evening

Friday Morning

A large high pressure area centered in western Quebec has send very chilly air into New England. As the high area moves off the coast tomorrow, the flow will become south to southwesterly; this will sponsor a warmup during the weekend for the Middle and North Atlantic states.

A cold front now in the Northern Plains will reach the Chicago area tomorrow evening. Some locally violent thunderstorms can break out along and ahead of the cold front. The front looks like it will reach the I-95 corridor Sunday evening, so most of Sunday should be dry from Philadelphia to Boston. Dry weather is great for outdoor activities but that region has been in a dry spell of late.

The reason I used a question mark in the title is that some computer forecasts suggest warm air could return to the East Coast next weekend. However, you may recall I bought into that idea a couple of weeks ago, and the heat never came.

This video has more.

Followup on this week's rain:

At the beginning of the week, our forecasts and graphics suggested that heavy rain could move northeast to affect the Central Plains late in the week. The U.S. computer models kept the moisture farther south than the European model, and U.S. model did better this time. We always look back at our previous forecasts to try to learn from episodes when we believe we could have done better. The following satellite picture shows dry weather today in just the area that originally looked like it would have more rain.