Looking Great Through the Weekend!

By Jay Grymes & Steve Caparotta

WAFB First Alert Quickcast:

- a little warmer for Friday & Saturday
- a dry cool front arrives Sunday
- dry all of next week too
- Gonzalo taking aim at Bermuda

Well, our forecast remains on track: fair skies and relatively low humidity will make for comfortable mornings and mild-to-warm afternoons. We’re calling for morning lows in the upper 50°s to low 60°s through the next five to seven days with afternoon highs in the low to mid 80°s. Patchy fog around sunrise could be an issue for some locations over the coming days, but for now we don’t expect any Fog Advisories ... not at least over the next several days.

True, you may need to water the fall garden or that ornamental landscaping, but other than that it’s difficult to complain. The way it looks right now, we will likely remain rain-free this weekend, through the entire upcoming work week and quite possibly through next weekend too!

About the only thing that we’ll have to work on will be the day-to-day temperatures: we’ll tweak them a degree or two here and there, but even those forecast numbers appear to be on pretty solid footing.

Our extended outlook is still calling for a pair of weak cool fronts to push through our viewing area in the short-to-medium range. The first gets through here Saturday but it will be a dry front, knocking back Sunday temperatures a couple of degrees and delivering a booster-shot of low-humidity air. After highs for Baton Rouge in the mid 80°s on Friday and Saturday, Sunday will top out in the low 80°s. A second ‘dry’ front pushes through the WAFB region early Tuesday: once again helping to drop area temperatures a couple of degrees and helping keep humidities comfortably low.

So get set for a prolonged run of fair-sky days, ranging from sunny to partly cloudy, with blue skies the rule rather than the exception.

In the western Atlantic, Gonzalo remains the weather focus as ‘he’ continues on a collision course with Bermuda. If you were with us last night during the 10PM Newscast, we noted how Gonzalo was developing a well-defined eye and that intense convection was wrapping entirely around the center: signs that a new round of intensification was likely. Well, that is exactly what happened and as of this morning, Category 4 Gonzalo became stronger than ever with peak sustained winds near 145 mph. As of 4PM, Gonzalo is still maintaining sustained winds at 145 mph with gusts into the 170s! For the trivia-minded, that makes Gonzalo the hurricane with the highest winds over the Atlantic Basin since Igor, back in September 2010.

Although Gonzalo is expected to weaken before reaching Bermuda, the cyclone will still be a ‘major’ hurricane as it approaches and passes the island-nation. For Bermuda residents, the questions are: “How close will Gonzalo get?” and “How bad will it be?”