A Return of Summer?

By Jay Grymes & Steve Caparotta

The good news is that we’ll stay mainly dry into the latter part of the week -- the bad news is that the front we thought might provide another round of fall-like weather failed to make it far enough south to have an impact. So we’ll be dealing with warmer-than-normal days through the work week and into the weekend.

An upper-level trough has set-up shop a little farther east than we had hoped. As a result, the surge of cooler, Canadian air that we thought would arrive over the past 24 hours or so also slipped off farther to the east, leaving us under the influence of an upper ridge centered over the Southern Plains. While this set-up does mean that we will continue to get a dry northwesterly flow aloft, sinking air from above and a warm, moist flow in off the Gulf will keep conditions warmer-than-normal and a bit humid through the rest of the week.

With light winds and dew points in the upper 60°s for each morning, patchy morning fog can be expected for each of the next few days, at least. In fact, some of that fog could be locally-dense, although not so widespread as to prompt a fog advisory.

Highs will climb into the upper 80°s to low 90°s, and with the humidity it will have a summer-like feel to the week, even though this is the first week of autumn.

We’ll be watching the development of a storm system in the Southern Plains by the end of the week, and the outlook for the weekend calls for decent rain chances. There remains a little uncertainty as to how the weekend weather will evolve, but for now we’re going with isolated to scattered rains for Friday, with higher rain chances for Saturday into Sunday.

In the tropics, we’re STILL watching T.S. Nadine as she continues to spin over the Atlantic. The latest round of forecasts suggests that Nadine could complete a loop over the east-central Atlantic, and the National Hurricane Center’s last discussion (10AM this morning) has Nadine still going strong five days from now!

If you are wondering, today marks ‘Day 13’ for Nadine. For the Atlantic Basin, the average length of time for a ‘named storm’ is only 6-7 days. Since 1851, there have been four systems to maintain “named strength” (ranked as a tropical storm, sub-tropical storm or hurricane) for 21 days or more, with a storm in 1899 lasting an amazing 27.75 days! 1971’s Ginger lasted 27.00 days, 1969’s Inga maintained tropical-storm or hurricane intensity for 24.75 days, and most recently, 2002’s Kyle persisted for 22.00 days.