Edmund Schweppe

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration has put out their official 2024 Atlantic hurricane season forecast - and, as the Boston Globe reports, it's an "extraordinary" one:
( 17 to 25 named storms this season )

"Higher ranges ... than 2005" - you know, the year they ran out of names for named storms and had to hit the Greek alphabet?

Yay.

The actual NOAA press release is worth reading (and not paywalled!)

The National Weather Service still has a Winter Storm Warning posted for my neck of the woods until 1AM tomorrow morning:
( but only another inch or two of accumulation )
I'm not going anywhere tonight, so no worries on my part. Seven inches of accumulation as of this morning; eleven as of just a moment ago. Alas, the winds are picking up, so going for a walk tonight won't qualify as fun.

And Wednesday is still forecast for low 50s (F) and rain, so it'll probably be all washed away come Thursday.

More thunderstorms this afternoon. Also, a fortunately brief loss of power; presumably one of the system's automatic transferring dinguses successfully transferred this time.

Many of the branches and trees downed by the Friday storms are still lying about, waiting to be collected. Not to mention all the pine cones that haven't been ground to mush by local traffic.

The joy of living in New England: we're downwind of the entire damn continent. In this case, smoke from Canadian wildfires has been causing poor air quality:
( Unhealthy in Massachusetts )

That's bad, but not nearly as bad as in New York City and parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York state, where air quality index readings for PM2.5 were over 400 at times:
( Hazardous in NY/PA/NJ )

Locally, things have gotten better; according to the helpful AirNow.gov site, my local AQI is down to 26 (and the PM2.5 AQI is down to 24!).

An actual, for-real snowstorm!
( Winter Storm Warning )
The current local forecast calls for snow mixed with rain tomorrow morning, becoming all snow by noon, and ending sometime during the day Wednesday. This is going to be heavy, wet slop.

We didn't have a whole lot of snow during December, January and February. Naturally, what may ending up being the biggest storm of the season is taking place after we switch to Daylight Savings Time. (Daylight Savings Time being a different set of rants.)

Getting a huge blast of arctic air today and tomorrow morning:
( National Weather Service Wind Chill Warning )

My current local NWS forecast calls for a low of -10F tonight ... and a high of 46F on Sunday. That's a fifty-six degree swing. Eric Fisher (WBZ chief meteorologist) tweeted last night that the biggest 30-hour temperature swing in Boston history was fifty-one degrees. I guess this is to balance out the ridiculously warm weather we were having around Christmas?

Seventies on Saturday, and now it's snowing.

Not that this will accumulate much. And what does fall will either melt or be washed away tomorrow.

Last night's low temperature at Hanscom Field? 68F at 22:51. The noontime reading? 73F.

Supposedly a cold front is coming through later today, and we get back to seasonable temperatures. Tomorrow's predicted high is 52F, and Tuesday night's predicted low is 22F.

Currently 75F at the nearest official weather station (Hanscom Field). And it's November 5.

Simply absurd.

With more of the same predicted for tomorrow and Monday.

Not what one expects around here once the leaves have dropped.

Today is the hottest day of the year so far. So of course the power is starting to flicker. It's been dropping on and off since around 3:30 this afternoon. At the moment, it's on. However, Eversource (the local utility company) just sent me a message that they are "We are aware of an outage in the area of [my address] affecting approximately 2233 customer(s). Based on our experience with these types of events, we expect to restore power by 07/20 06:45 PM."

I'm guessing this isn't a simple instance of someone knocking down a pole, but rather one or more pieces of infrastructure failing under load. Hopefully it's a reasonably quick fix, once they figure it out. On the other hand, looking at their outage map, there's a whole bunch of outages in the area, so maybe not.

Meanwhile, ARRRGH!

Today's local National Weather Service forecast calls for a high near 66 Fahrenheit early this afternoon with mostly sunny skies.

Oh, and a Winter Storm Watch is up for all of Friday, midnight-to-midnight:
( what's six to twelve inches of snow among friends? )

Gotta love New England weather.

Whee! Blizzard warnings now up effective tonight!
( Read more... )
It's an upgrade (for some value of "upgrade") from earlier today. The predicted snowfall totals haven't changed, but they've now included "considerable blowing and drifting snow along with near white out conditions at times"; presumably, that's what caused the shift to a blizzard warning.

Still, I'm not overly worried personally; the local power lines are all underground, and we're close enough to the main feeders that an extended outage is awfully unlikely. And I don't have anywhere I need to go for the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service has posted our first Winter Storm Warning of the season, with five to eight inches expected in my neck of the woods tomorrow morning:
( Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow )
I'm actually on the lighter side of the current forecast, with ten inches or more possible in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Tropical Storm Henri made landfall today just after noon near Westerly, RI:
( Read more... )
Henri is currently just southeast of Hartford CT, moving towards the north-northwest. Lots of rain for northern New Jersey and southern New York. Basically a non-event for me, which is how I like my natural disasters.

Courtesy of the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred and the National Weather Service:
( Read more... )