Archive for category: New Hampshire

Meteorological summer is in the books. It was slightly cooler than normal in most of Southeastern New England. June and July were near normal, but August was about 2° cooler than normal, and enough to offset any warmth in the first two months. The season was notable because of the lack of extreme heat – something we foresaw in our summer outlook. As usual, rainfall totals varied widely based on the localized nature of summer storms. Coastal Southeastern Massachusetts saw more rain than normal, but most of RI had a dry summer – which we also predicted in our summer outlook. So far, the hurricane season is running well below normal, as expected.

Fall Outlook

The warmer than normal weather that we’ll have in the first week of September is a sign of what we expect for at least the first half of the fall (Sep-Nov). It finally looks like a ridge is setting up along the Eastern Seaboard, and that should make September warmer than normal, and possibly the warmest month of the year – relative to normal. That’s not saying much since there has not been a month more than 0.6° warmer than normal this year in the Providence area.

At one point, it looked like an El Niño was near certain for the fall and winter. The latest update from NOAA has lowered the odds of an El Niño to about 65% for the fall and winter. It does not look like there will be a strong El Niño developing. Even though there has not been much warming in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, it has been a quiet hurricane season. We do not expect there to be much change in that regard for the rest of the season. Typically, the action picks up in September, peaking early in the month, and we expect increased activity relative to what’s happened so far, but not enough to make it a near or above normal season. The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) is running ahead of last year’s anemic pace, and should not be as low by the end of the season. Last year the ACE in the Atlantic Basin was 30% of normal. This year, so far, it’s 58% of normal.

Here is the latest NOAA Seasonal Outlook:

7-12 Named Storms
3-6 Hurricanes
0-2 Major Hurricanes
Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) range of 40%-90% of the median.

Precipitation forecasts are always tricky, and the potential for a developing El Nino lends itself to wet weather in the Northeast. However, barring a tropical system, we do not expect September to be a very rainy month. Overall, we expect there to be near normal precipitation in Southern New England this fall.

A Peek at Winter

Looking ahead to winter, we are favoring an active winter in the Northeast. Our preliminary outlook is for near to below normal temperatures and above normal precipitation and snowfall. The JAMSTEC (Japanese) model is bullish on cold weather for the US this winter, the CFS (American) model paints a different picture, but has been trending colder. In my opinion, the JAMSTEC has a better track record than the CFS.

We are 20 days into August and there has only been one day, August 6  (+3°), more than 1° above normal. And, lately, there have not been any “warm” days. The past 10 days have been at or cooler than normal in the Providence area. We’ll keep the streak going into, and probably through, the weekend. The best, and possibly only, chance of widespread showers in RI and SE MA through most of next week is Friday morning. There will be increasing sunshine during the weekend, and it will gradually get warmer early next week.

By the middle of next week, it will be at or warmer than normal for a few days. A cold front will bring the threat of a few showers late in the workweek or early in the Labor Day weekend. The front looks progressive, and another area of high pressure will move in from central Canada bringing more fair and seasonable weather.

The disturbance in the tropics has moved well north of the computer model consensus from a couple of days ago. Per the NHC, it has a 50-70% chance of becoming a tropical storm in the next 2-5 days. If Cristobal forms, the odds favor it passing east of Florida and moving out to sea, but a track farther south into the Gulf of Mexico is not completely off the table at this point. In any event, it’s no imminent threat to land.

 

We are halfway through August, and the month is running about 2° cooler than normal in Southeastern New England. It was dry for a while, but Wednesday’s rainfall more than made up for the deficit in many spots, including the Providence area.

The first Long-Range Forecast of the week highlighted the potential for warm weather late in August. Now, it looks like the warmth will not be too impressive in the Northeast, and there are signs that it could be near or even slightly below normal. The bottom-line is more 90° heat seems unlikely, and the high temperature for the year in Providence may wind up being a relatively low 91°, with only three days reaching 90. That’s a far cry from last year, but something we were expecting in the seasonal outlook.

Unsettled weather will not be far from Southern New England in the next couple of weeks. At this point, it looks like high pressure over the Northeast and Eastern Canada will keep the rain away most of the time. If there is going to be a warm-up, it looks like it will happen late in the month, but, there has been a recent computer model trend where the warmth is there in days 10-15, but as those days near, it disappears.