WEATHER
We’ve been stuck in this exceptionally warm weather pattern for almost two weeks now, and the hottest day of this stretch will be today.
Highs this afternoon will reach the upper 90s, even touching 100° in our southern counties.
Today’s record high temperatures don’t stand a chance.
I think we’ll break the Triangle’s all-time October heat record today, and we’ll be awfully close to doing the same in Fayetteville.
And because it’s July 95th, we have to talk about the humidity too. Dew points won’t be dreadful, but the humidity certainly won’t be pleasant.
Combine the heat and humidity, and the heat index will exceed 100° in a lot of places this afternoon.
If we hit 100° in the Triangle — very possible! — it would be the first time on record outside of the June 3 – Sept 10 range. Record-keeping here goes back to 1887. THAT’S how unusual this weather pattern is.
Things start to change tomorrow, but it will still be warm and muggy as you head out early Friday morning.
A cold front will slip through Friday morning, turning our winds to the northeast — that will bring some cooler and drier air in to central North Carolina. Friday will be almost 10° cooler than today, which is a substantial difference — but that still puts us into the 80s and low 90s for highs.
The humidity will drop substantially on Friday, the first stage of relief from the oppressive weather pattern.
Saturday will bring us the long-awaited autumnal temperatures. We’ll start in the 50s and only warm up to the 70s, with more clouds than sun overhead. A modest warm-up Sunday and Monday puts us back to or above 80°…but another cold front Monday night will bring in another wave of cooler air for Tuesday and Wednesday. Even better, that cold front will bring us a decent chance of rain Monday night!
TROPICAL UPDATE
For the first time in a long time, I don’t have to type much in this section. We’re tracking one area of disturbed weather in the Caribbean — it has a low chance of even becoming a tropical depression as it tracks to the west over the next 5 days.
Nothing else brewing in tropics! Finally!
LINKS
- Lorenzo is no longer a tropical system, but it’s still a remarkable storm as it tracks toward Ireland.
- Houston is finding out how much — and how fast — a city can adapt to climate change.
- SpaceX’s “mega starship” may have more questions than answers.
- Saturn’s moon Enceladus regularly blasts a plume of material from its underground ocean into space, and NASA’s Cassini spacecraft flew right through the material to sample it. Now, an ongoing deep-dive into Cassini data has found new kinds of organic molecules there.
- Our Milky Way is a vast disk of stars 100,000 light years across. We’ve known for a while that the Sun is about halfway from the center to the edge. But where is it vertically in the galactic disk? That’s a lot harder to figure out!
- Given all the real estate in the cosmos, astronomers generally agree there’s got to be other beings out there. A new tool might help find them.
- The world is finally fighting back against Facebook.
- A study of blind people who use echolocation — making clicks with their mouths to judge the location of objects when sound bounces back — reveals a degree of “neural repurposing” never before documented.
- By analyzing ancient DNA, researchers have found the earliest known evidence of the Black Death coming from Laishevo, in Russia’s Volga region.
- Your pup’s ability to learn new tricks has more to do with genetics than your careful training.