Thursday 9 a.m.
The Geminid meteor shower should be visible throughout the Northeast tonight for sky watchers away from city lights. The meteors that streak across the sky come from a stream of dusty debris from a comet named 3200 Phaethon. According to NASA scientist Bill Cooke, another meteor shower could appear tonight. This would be debris from Comet Wirtanen, which was discovered in 1948. It is not known if the the potential meteors actually exist because this is the first time Earth is traveling through a region of space where the debris stream would be. In an article on the site http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/11dec_newshower/, it is stated that in dark rural areas more than 120 meteors per hour may be seen tonight.
The video today shows a forecast scenario that takes us through much of next week and adds Christmas Eve. There is a lot of uncertainty about the storm situation early in the week.
One other thing, if you are being interviewed by a reporter from TV, radio, a newspaper or an online journalist at accuweather.com, remember to treat the media right.
And, if you don't want to stand out in the cold, I have taken the only known (to me) picture of a comet over a coastline:
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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