Saturday Forecast

23 Comments

8:37AM

DAYS 1-5 (SEPTEMBER 29-OCTOBER 3)
High pressure dominates the weather this weekend. A weak boundary sneaks by tonight and divides a mild day today from a slightly cooler tomorrow, but the difference will not be very drastic. That boundary scoots back to the north allowing a warm-up as October gets underway, then comes back to the south to produce a round of showers Tuesday night and bringing slightly cooler air as it dries out again Wednesday. Forecast details…
TODAY: Areas of fog and low clouds southern MA, RI, and eastern CT through mid morning, otherwise mostly sunny. Highs 68-75. Wind NW 5-15 MPH.
TONIGHT: Partly cloudy. Lows 43-52, mildest immediate coast and urban areas Wind light W shifting to N.
SUNDAY: Mostly sunny. Highs 63-70. Wind light variable.
SUNDAY NIGHT: Variably cloudy. Lows 46-53. Wind light variable.
MONDAY: Partly sunny. Highs 67-74. Wind SW 5-15 MPH.
TUESDAY: Partly cloudy. Showers likely at night. Lows in the 50s. Highs in the 70s.
WEDNESDAY: Partly sunny. Showers possible early. Lows in the 50s. Highs from the middle to upper 60s.

DAYS 6-10 (OCTOBER 4-8)
Looking more and more like high pressure will be stronger along the East Coast during this period. At the surface, we’ll be back in the warm sector October 4 then on the other side of a front, the “cooler” side, which won’t really be much cooler, October 5, only to go back to the warm side of it for a couple days before reversing itself yet again, but with all this wavering of an air mass boundary, it looks like a fairly dry pattern with the high pressure aloft in control.

DAYS 11-15 (OCTOBER 9-13)
Since the 6-10 day period did not present itself the way it now looks, there is pretty much a low confidence lock on this period, but the early guess is a weakening of high pressure and a more west to east flow and a trend toward somewhat more seasonable though changeable weather.

23 thoughts on “Saturday Forecast”

  2. Thanks TK!

    According to Dave Epstein, with this upcoming week to be fairly mild, the fall colors are going to be delayed further. He also showed a graph of the dates of the average first frost by location within the state, and pointed out that the dates have been pushed back much later over the years due to our planet continually warming.

    The average first frost for Boston is sometime after November 1st. Even the Berkshires aren’t expected a frost anytime soon, early/mid October at the earliest.

    1. I don’t think the colors will really be pushed back much more, if at all.

      We’ll also have to see what happens with those first frost dates, which have also been responding to the AMO, which peaks in current phase in 2019 or 2020, then reverses.

      Believe it or not I would not be surprised if (after the Pacific settles a bit) we get some early frosts / freezes, or at least close to average dates. There is going to be plenty of cold air not all that far away. It’s just a matter of getting things to set up the right away. And just because the East is warm, doesn’t mean everybody is warm. We have a pattern in which the ridge is most persistent in the East right now. Uncertainty with tropicals’ influence on the pattern taken into account, odds favor this pattern for at least the first 2 weeks of the new month. No different that my thoughts going back a couple weeks.

  4. Colleague who follows the Pacific tropical activity a lot more closely than I do pointed out the systems are impacting the medium range models’ (all of them) ability to produce a reasonably accurate pattern forecast, and this should be taken into account during the current active systems.

    We saw what some media described as a high confidence forecast of a big ridge West, trough East, with a shot of significant chill into the Northeast to start October. When those days get here, 60s and 70s are going to be the rule. Hardly a significant chill. 😉 Just another reminder that just because the models say it, does not mean this is what’s coming…

      1. We’ll shoot it into the 60s a couple times. That’s not really unusual for a mild October pattern anyway, especially until about October 20.

  7. Thanks TK. 10/10 fall day.

    The Pacific is definitely where the uncertainty in the medium and longer range is stemming from right now. We’ve been in a very active tropical cyclone regime really in the entire tropical Pacific Ocean, from east to west, and that isn’t changing. And mishandling of these TCs is probably why the trough in the East never panned out. Now we’ve got operational and ensemble guidance basically saying nothing but eastern US ridging for the next 2+ weeks. We’ll see what happens. I think October is opening with fairly short odds to be a top 10 warmest, but there’s plenty of uncertainty out there.

    1. What will probably happen is that the models will also miss the actual trough that cycles into the East several times later in the month. 😉

      We’ve had false troughs showing up in guidance for weeks now and we can trace almost all of them back to “misread” tropical connections by the models. It was a gamble but that’s why I felt compelled to stay with the persistence pattern more than biting on these changes fully.

  8. What a perfect day today.

    Warm sun and cool mountain air for some friends who went hiking today in the White Mountains up around Rangeley. They posted pictures of clouds and sun and mountain vistas, mostly still very green there. Oh, and waterfalls from all the recent rains.

        1. My grandfather said he use to have frosts usually by the last week or so of September if not earlier. Now its lucky to get in 2 week of October.

          1. Your grandfather would be more accurate. I should have said Labor Day would more often than not have us in heavy jackets heading out to fish for early temps in the 30s which does not translate to a frost

            1. Back in elementary school (mid-late 1960s) by early October we had to collect fallen leaves and put them in wax paper as an assignment. IIRC we had a couple days to turn them in. I remember it as a very fun school project.

              Suffice to say, that project today would have to wait until around Halloween, if not Veterans Day. 😉

    2. I love the rangeley area. I spent wonderful summers and falls on Mooselookmeguntic in Oquossoc fishing and boating and parmacheene a bit north of there. Although I know light has more to do with color change than temp…or at least a good amount to do with it….this is late for that area. We typically had early morning frosts when we started out to fish by Labor Day.

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