Northeast to have a long period of dry weather... unless...

The overall weather pattern in the eastern part of the country seems to be settling and will not change much. That means if it's sunny when the pattern is established, it will remain so for days. If it's raining at the beginning of a period, it may be wet for a long time.

The map above shows a massive ridge covering east central Canada and the Great Lakes region while a cut off low pressure area is over the Carolinas. If the low pressure area was not there, this would be a major heat wave for all of the middle eastern part of the country. Indeed, it will be hot across most of the Plains into the Great Lakes. However, the low pressure area will cause showery weather with some thunderstorms. Computer models a few days ago were suggesting that the low pressure area would be centered farther north. However, the recent trend has been for the low pressure area to be farther south. If that's true, the high-pressure area and its dry weather will cover all of the Northeast, while persistent showery weather makes it quite moist from the Carolinas southward.

The following map shows the visible clouds across the United States as of late this afternoon:

The band of cloudiness stretching from Florida out to the ocean East of New England is the cold front that recently came through the Northeast states.

In the title, I included the word "unless" because if the low pressure area happens to be farther north than the computer model suggests, the dry forecast will be all wet. As late as Thursday, there is quite a spread in what the computer models were saying. If you have been following the medical news for the last few months, you have seen lots of talk about models. Slight variations in the way in which models handle the information and slight variations in the data put into them can really make a difference in what a model predicts.

Moving to another topic, scientists have discovered that there are increasing blooms in the oceans: a proliferation of plankton. The following picture shows a turquoise in far northern Europe:

There have also been some interesting articles about noctilucent clouds in recent editions of spaceweather.com. I may show you some of those in the next couple of reports.