WEATHER
We started off with a few light showers this morning, thanks to the humidity that steadily increased over the last 24 hours. But the August sunshine is already burning through the leftover clouds, and temperatures will warm well into the 80s this afternoon:
A few showers will pop back up this afternoon, but they’ll be pretty few and far between:
The HRRR model’s radar simulation from 10:00am through 10:00pm is thoroughly unimpressed with our rain chances:
Today’s humidity isn’t pleasant, but a significantly drier air mass will move in tonight — we’ll stay (mostly) on the lower half of the Muggy Meter until Sunday:
Dry weather prevails from tomorrow into the first day of Labor Day weekend, then things get…complicated:
Sunday and Monday will bring us enough humidity to fuel some scattered showers or storms, but the long-range forecast largely hinges on how Tropical Storm Dorian behaves.
TROPICS
Tropical Storm Dorian is still making its way through the Caribbean, and will pass over Puerto Rico later today:
The latest forecast from the National Hurricane Center is north of previous forecast tracks, and shows Dorian becoming a hurricane by tomorrow night:
The northward shift in the projected path means that Dorian will avoid interacting with the Bahamas, and should avoid any strong wind shear that would disrupt further intensification. The warm water in the southwestern Atlantic will provide the fuel for Dorian to strengthen further:
The NHC anticipates that Dorian will approach Florida over the weekend, still as a hurricane:
The “cone of uncertainty” is wide at that point, and the range of possibilities from the forecast data is even wider. The majority of computer models follow the NHC’s path toward the Florida coast, but a few are now showing a northward curve (image from TropicalTidbits.com):
The forecast models are also showing significant disagreement regarding how much Dorian will strengthen later this week:
Let’s focus on just the European forecast model’s ensemble — it’s the same model run dozens of times with slightly different conditions, to give us a range of possibilities. The “spaghettios” plot from that model shows the position and intensity of Dorian from those dozens of model runs — the potential tracks range from Key West to Hatteras, and the potential intensities range from tropical storm to major hurricane:
Frustrating? YUP. I’d love to be able to give you a confident forecast of “this is where it’s going, this is how strong it will be,” but the data is just all over the place right now. EVERYONE from the Outer Banks to the Florida Keys should be paying attention to this storm over the next several days. It’s likely that some of the moisture associated with Dorian will eventually make its way into central North Carolina next week, but any potential direct impact for the Carolina coast is purely speculative at this point. We’ll keep you updated with the latest information as we head into the holiday weekend…
LINKS
- Crazy flooding, hail, and tornadoes all impacted parts of Spain earlier this week.
- Hurricane modification is on the scientific fringes today, but in the 1960s and 1970s it was a vibrant area of research.
- We think of Arizona and Nevada as places that are accustomed to extreme heat…but the number of heat-related deaths has tripled in those states since 2014.
- It’s not just Brazil — fires are also spreading throughout tropical rain forests worldwide.
- The five newly-discovered moons of Jupiter now have names.
- Speaking of Jupiter…you know what it looks like, right? Big planet, striped clouds, big red spot. But things get weird when you look at familiar stuff in an unfamiliar way.
- NASA’s Mars missions are about to take a little break, since the red planet will be on the other side of the Sun from us.
- As more elements are discovered at the far reaches of the periodic table, will the table hold up well enough to contain them?
- A key problem with blaming mass shootings on mental illness — people mean lots of different things when they talk about “mental illness” and the assumptions you’re likely making don’t line up with the data.
- Yes, the August arrival of pumpkin spice “season” is absurd, but know that zoo animals are as basic as the rest of America.
- Well, this is terrifying: A look back at how a few small goofs nearly touched off a nuclear war.
