Return of the heat and a look at the tropics

The surface chart and radar

 

 

We can see high pressure building south, providing lots of sunshine and above average temperatures. But we do have a frontal boundary hanging out over the Delmarva.  Along that boundary, we do have scattered rain showers. This boundary is going to be bouncing around for much of this week, keeping things unsettled. We also have a weather pattern sitting over North America called an Omega Block.   It’s called this because the jet stream from west to east sets up into what looks like the Greek letter omega. The block causes the typical east-west flow of the jet stream systems to move slowly around it for several days, leading to the day after day weather systems hanging around across the country. Here’s a look at the 500 mb anomaly chart from tropical tidbits.  I’ve drawn on the chart the omega shape in the flow.

 

What this means for us here in our region; is we’re going to see a series of shortwave disturbances drop out of Canada and move across the Northeast. 

This is going to help the frontal boundary keep things very unsettled.  

Tomorrow will feature increasing clouds and scattered rain showers as a backdoor cold front slide through later in the day out of Canada.  This will be the first of two surges of Canadian air; this will make for Thursday into Friday to cool back off with temperatures becoming seasonal for this time of year. With the trough isolated to scattered pesky rain showers will be an issue. The rain will be a bigger issue for southern Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic, but even here the showers should be light. Friday during the day won’t be too bad as high pressure will be pushing in. Then for later Friday and Saturday a more robust system with a cold front will bring rain showers to the region. It is also going to produce a stronger surge of cool air into the Northeast over the weekend. Along with the rain will be the chance for wet snowflakes mixing across the   higher peaks of the Adirondacks, Greens and White Mountains Friday night into Saturday. Some interior valleys could also see some frost. But that should be isolated.

Sunday will see high pressure return providing the nicest day of the weekend, with temperatures turning a bit milder. Then on Monday we will see another of low pressure centered to our south bring back the rain showers into the region. On Tuesday this area of low pressure will be sliding off the Middle Atlantic Coast and will be intensifying. This will keep interior parts of the region unsettled, with more in the way of widespread rain showers over the northern Middle Atlantic and Southern New England.

 The tropics

We do have a large area of rain out over the Central into eastern Gulf of America. But this won’t develop into anything tropical.

We have a front that is dropping south and east into the Gulf. This is going to interact with a disturbance currently in the Western Caribbean and tug it to the north. The SSTs in this area are warm enough to support tropical development. 

Image Credit Tropical Tidbits 

 This will track into the eastern Gulf toward Florida and southern Atlantic coast. The odds of this becoming Arthur are very low, but it is likely to bring some wind and locally heavy rain across parts of the Florida Peninsula for the final weekend of May into early June.