If you read my blog regularly you might have figured out I spend a bit of time in Harpswell. One of the things I love about that particular area is the morning light. This time of year we are losing light very fast on the order of close to 3 minutes a day. The sunrises are now after 6AM and will continue to grow later and later. Just before we set the clocks back in early November the sunrise will be well after 7AM. While the official sunrise is important, for those of you (myself included) who walk, run, work or just wait for a bus outside, the time of civil twilight is equally noteworthy.
Right now, you can still start a walk in the morning just after 5:30 if you are not surrounded by trees. (they make it darker) A walk on the beach at 5:30 would be light enough to see. Below is a picture of the sunrise and sunset over the next few weeks. You can see how the time of civil twilight changes through the month.
Another warm day more like mid-summer is on the weather menu. It’s ironic of course that many of you wanted this weather for your vacations in July and August, but the summer brought more dry and pleasantly warm air rather than the hot and humid stuff. If this same pattern had set up in mid-July most of the high temperature would have been in the 90s inland, not the 80s. We have lost about 2 hours and 20 minutes of possible sunlight since the summer solstice and therefore gained that much darkness. This means the nights, even in this pattern, are able to cool more and the days won’t get quite as hot as they would have 8 weeks ago.
The highs today will reach the mid to upper 80s and a few spots will no doubt touch 90F for a couple of hours this afternoon. The humidity won’t be oppressive, but it will be rising. It’s not until tonight and tomorrow that the air will have that pure tropical feel to it and when it reaches this level, most of us are ready for it to end.
The good news is that a cold front will be sweeping east moving the summer air out to sea tomorrow. The bad news is this front is likely going to produce widespread showers and thunderstorms and some of these could reach strong to severe levels.
The map below is issued by the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. They are part of the National Weather Service and severe weather is their main focus. Tomorrow, New England has a slight risk of severe weather. Notice we have the highest risk of big thunderstorm, but the risk itself is at the lower end of the scale. This means we will have to keep a close watch on developing thunderstorms in the afternoon.
The radar prediction for tomorrow shows a line of storms in the afternoon marching eastward. The most likely time of these storms will be from about 2PM until 9PM from west to east across New England. This doesn’t mean storms can’t occur a bit earlier or later, that is just the most likely scenario. If you do see showers and storms they will last about 1-2 hours. Since the window of rain is small, I would still go ahead with outdoor plans, just be aware they might be interrupted.
Once the front clears the coastline, drier air follows. The night will become progressively cooler and more importantly drier tomorrow. It might be after you go to sleep that it feels a lot better, so air conditioning could be in order early in the evening. By Sunday morning you can fling the windows open and shut off the AC for a while.
If you don’t see rain from the storms tomorrow, it might be a while before we get wet again. There’s going to be a storm passing south of the area around Tuesday. The map below, which shows the total amount of rain for the next week, has our area getting some rain from the showers tomorrow, but the big swath of rain to our south off the coast indicates to me the next possible storm misses us.
Finally, while I was putting together the images for this blog entry I noticed the future radar projection for tomorrow has a nice rendition of Hurricane Norbert off the coast of Baja, California. This storm will bring heavy rain and some wind to Baja before it weakens on its northward track.
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