A plume of tropical humidity is blowing into New England on Thursday afternoon. Along with it, we have clouds of pollen blowing from the trees and torrential downpours falling from the clouds.
Low pressure in central Canada is the remnant of tropical storm Cristobal, and it’s a huge windstorm now sending a front into New England on Thursday and overnight.
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We are all vulnerable to the downpours, and there’s a slight chance there could be some highly localized flash flooding, with rainfall rates of more than three inches per hour for a short time.
And the pressure gradient is such that even away from the thunderstorms we have wind gusting to 40 mph, some of the thunderstorms may generate isolated winds damage of gusts greater than 55 mph.
And we also have training storms -- that means one storm comes in and then it leaves, only to be replaced by another storm. Individual cells are moving to the northeast at 45 mph, but the line itself is only slowly moving from west to east and will not be off the coast until daybreak Friday.
Even though the temperature is near 80 degrees, it is very sticky outside on Thursday and rainfall does cool us off and washes out the pollen. Every bit of rain is welcome.
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Showers and storms are ongoing and southern, and it will be clearing as the sun goes down with much less humid air coming in overnight. The low temperature will be in the 50s north and holding around 70 degrees south.
High pressure from the Midwest moves in Friday with much less humid air. The temperature should get to the lower 80s with almost full sunshine. The exception is the Canadian border, where an additional cold front may generate some afternoon showers and temperatures will be closer to 70 degrees.
The weekend starts off beautiful with low humidity and plenty of sunshine for our Saturday, but then as the high moves to our northeast on Sunday we may get a breeze in off the ocean with low clouds and perhaps some fog and drizzle developing in parts of New England late in the day.
It looks like there’s going to be a low pressure system stalling south of New England on Monday and Tuesday. It's a huge question whether we get into the rain or just a flowing off the ocean. Either way we are in for a cooling trend Monday and Tuesday with a chance of rain south.
Depending on the track of that upper level low, most of us should clear out and warm up dramatically in the second half of our First Alert 10-Day Forecast that goes into next weekend.
