For those who love classic, early autumn weather, the next few days will be a highlight of the season.
The passage of a cold front early Thursday morning was the second cold front in 36 hours – the first, Tuesday night, brought scattered downpours and thunder, while this most recent push of cooler air had far less fanfare: a puff of wind and a swath of clouds in what was already dry air.
The result has been a renewed installment of even drier air, bringing ample sunshine but cool by nature as it drains southeast from Canada. A frosty dawn in Ontario and Quebec may portend a frosty night Thursday night in the deepest valleys of the North Country of New England, though for most of the six-state region Thursday afternoon highs of 65-70 degrees will be followed by overnight lows in the 40s, with a gentle northwest wind continuing through the night.
Get Boston local news, weather forecasts, lifestyle and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC Boston’s newsletters.
Friday’s chilly start will feature some pockets of fog near bodies or relatively warm water like ponds and lakes, but otherwise will yield to plenty of sunshine for recovering temperatures to either side of 70 degrees for many and a steady but not overwhelming northwest breeze.
As dry air holds firm into the weekend, Saturday looks delightful with a light enough wind that sea breezes will kick up along the coast, but not before high temperatures reach either side of 70 degrees and should rise into the 70s inland. The big question in the Sunday forecast is what time showers arrive. A cold front sagging south from Canada will intersect the still-returning warmth into southern New England and seems fairly certain to touch off showers in northern New England, particularly from late morning onward.
Farther south, however, the timing of the cold front will be key in how many showers crop up Sunday and how early. After trending earlier and earlier over the last few days (originally, days ago, it looked like first showers might be late Monday! That forecast changed a few days ago), the trend of a quicker arrival has finally stopped and today is the second day in a row we have consistency with a though of later afternoon or evening arrival of showers to southern New England.
While this does bode well for outdoor plans in the southern half of New England Sunday, our First Alert Team is always completely transparent and humble in our approach, so we realize that a different arrival time of showers by three to five hours, three and a half days from this writing, certainly is within the realm of possibility and would have a big impact on Sunday afternoon plans, so we encourage staying tuned to our forecasts.
Once they arrive, showers are expected to continue cropping up Monday and Tuesday before improved weather likely returns. Meanwhile, our team is watching Tropical Storm Fiona – forecast to swing close to or hit Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic over the weekend, but still an uncertainty beyond there. Given the frequency of Canadian cold fronts we’ve been seeing here in New England, any window of opportunity for the storm to come this far north would be awfully small – not impossible, but not very likely from this early standpoint.
