Summer warmth and humidity starts the week, but Monday is expected to be the warmest day of our First Alert 10-day forecast, with a sharp cold front set to move in from Canada Monday afternoon and evening, delivering some cooler, fresh air for the midweek.
For now, an increasing southwest, then west wind is transporting some haze, some wildfire smoke, and steadily increasing humidity to New England Monday with highs into the 80s, even under increasing and thickening clouds. The clouds will make it a tough day for sunbathing, but it’s not a bad beach day with a nearly calm sea and water temperatures in the 60s and 70s.
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Scattered showers and thunder will develop during the middle and late afternoon ahead of the approaching cold front, but aren’t expected to reach severe or damaging strength for most. That said, any amount of cloud-to-ground lightning can pose a danger to those outside, so remember the phrase, “When thunder roars, go indoors” – if you can hear thunder, lightning is close enough to be a threat.
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Showers will end gradually from northwest to southeast, clearing Vermont and New Hampshire by late day, northern Mass. by dinner and taking deeper into the evening further south, with the Cape seeing a few showers at times all the way into predawn Tuesday.
That said, Tuesday brings fresh, delightful air for all of New England with plenty of sunshine and comfortable highs in the 70s, with a repeat performance expected Wednesday. As a dome of heat builds across the central and western United States later this week, New England will lay east of that hot air dome, instead seeing multiple jet stream disturbances dropping across the Northeast for returning rounds of showers from later Thursday through Friday and into Saturday.
Although precise timing becomes more difficult to pin down the farther out in time a forecast is, right now the showers look to arrive from west to east midday to late day Thursday, respectively, and remain off and on in New England at least through Saturday morning, though it’s possible at least some showers linger longer than that. Of course, a steady feed of northern jet stream disturbances means New England stays out of the deeper warmth and humidity, but also tends to protect our region from an increasingly active Tropical Atlantic.
While Hilary has been the headline maker in California, multiple numbered and named disturbances in the Atlantic have developed, with Tropical Storm Franklin set to cross the Dominican Republic Thursday, Gert and Emily out at sea and a new, developing system in the Gulf expected to move into Texas Tuesday into Wednesday. For all that said, as long as Canadian cold fronts keep diving across New England, that provides multiple opportunities to sweep the tropical systems and their moisture out to sea before ever making it this far north.
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That said, a pattern like always leaves us on guard, as the brief windows between disturbances often are accompanied by increasing southerly atmospheric wind flow, which can open the door to the tropics – we just don’t see that happening imminently with the current series of tropical systems.
