WEATHER
The temperature when I came into work this morning (an hour that most sane people would call “last night”) was 55° — probably the warmest reading we’ll see in the Triangle until Monday afternoon! Rain, wind and cold are the stories of the day…let’s start with the rain.
Showers started moving in well before sunrise this morning — the heaviest and most-widespread rain will fall from mid-morning through mid-afternoon.
The HRRR model’s radar simulation from 9:00am through midnight shows the rain tapering off from west-to-east late this afternoon and this evening…but it also shows the chance for a few snowflakes or sleet pellets to mix with the last of the raindrops.
Don’t worry. The upper atmosphere will cool off enough to allow for the possibility of that wintry mix, but it won’t be able to stick. Temperatures here at ground level will also drop steadily throughout the day, down to the 30s by early evening.
Any snowflakes or sleet pellets that manage to reach the ground will land on warm, wet surfaces — so we expect wet roads, but no icy conditions. The “snowiest-case” scenario is for a slushy dusting on lawns and rooftops north of the Triangle.
While we’ll avoid any wintry accumulations this time around, we won’t be able to avoid the wintry temperatures. We’ll wake up Wednesday morning to temperatures in the low to mid 20s area-wide.
23° would tie the Triangle’s record low temperature on Wednesday. While we’ll be just as cold Thursday morning, the record for the 14th is just a bit colder.
Abundant sunshine on Wednesday won’t warm us up much, only to the low to mid 40s.
We’ll warm up to around 50° by Thursday afternoon — still 15° below-average, but warm enough that the next chance of showers Thursday night will be plain ol’ rain. This is the European forecast model’s simulation from noon Thursday through noon Friday.
The coastal storm system responsible for Thursday night’s rain will lock in a cool and showery pattern for Friday and Saturday.
At least, that’s the way things look right now. This kind of weather pattern is notoriously tricky to try to predict, so we’ll keep monitoring the data for potential changes.
If you’re looking for some warmer temperatures, you’re going to have to wait a while.
Next week will bring another chance for light rain on Tuesday, but it will also bring a slow return to near-normal temperatures.
Even more good news for folks who don’t like cold weather — the long-range 8-14 day outlook from the Climate Prediction Center shows a good chance of above-average temperatures.
LINKS
- We’re not alone in dealing with the cold: nearly 400 cold temperature records are likely to be set this week across the U.S. as the January-like air pours in from the Arctic.
- Wildfires near Sydney, Australia have households and organizations preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.
- Citizen scientists are offering information that helps researchers and scientists, and weather apps are benefiting from this trend.
- Researchers on a ship frozen into the Arctic ice are gathering data that will greatly improve weather prediction for that part of the world.
- Music is a universal language. Can communicating climate data as sound help motivate people to action?
- A huge concrete coffin holds almost 90 million liters of US nuclear waste on the Marshall Islands. Now sea-level rise is eating away at the dome…which is obviously less than ideal.
- While SpaceX is set to launch 60 communications satellites into orbit, astronomers worry that “megaconstellations” like this will disrupt scientific observations of the Universe.
- An unknown comet may have shed a big pile of material that the Earth will plunge through next week, causing a meteor storm. Bonus: They’ll appear to come from a constellation depicting a unicorn.
- A supernova would be the astronomical event of the century. So, what would happen then?
- What actually works for muscle recovery — and what doesn’t?
- Searchers have located a World War II American submarine, the U.S.S. Grayback, that has been missing since 1944.
- A team of psychologists found that people in positions of power tend to communicate more in the abstract.
- There are certain subjects that scientists talk about that just seem nonsensical…one of them is about the fundamental and underlying nature of matter.