Wednesday October 18 2023 Forecast (7:27AM)

38 Comments

DAYS 1-5 (OCTOBER 18-22)

The combination of low level moisture, cool air aloft, and one more disturbance sliding through from the southwest at mid levels will create a fair amount of cloud cover for the region today, but the rain shower threat should be confined to areas south of I-90, favoring the South Coast, and any showers that do occur will be on the lighter side and fairly quick-passing. High pressure builds in making Thursday the mild, dry easy pick of the week. And then things go downhill again quickly on Friday into the start of the weekend. What we will experience will be caused by the beginning of a convergence of 3 systems. The first is low pressure moving up the Atlantic Seaboard with a good slug of moisture. The second is a frontal system moving in from the west. The third is a rapidly-moving low pressure area diving southeast from the Upper Midwest. The upper level features with these initially are a trio of troughs which will eventually consolidate into one, along with one rapidly-strengthening surface low. But this triple merger will not complete itself until the system is already moving away. The weather we see will be the result of this being in progress. First, a few rounds of showers Friday afternoon and night with the first low moving up the coast, which will be weak, but contain a fair amount of moisture. The bulk of the rainfall should occur from late Friday evening to the early hours of Saturday. The frontal boundary will then cause a few additional rounds of showers during the day Saturday, but also allow several rain-free hours. It’s not really until the 3rd puzzle piece rounds the base of the trough and catches up to the system will it become a rapidly strengthening low in the Gulf of Maine, moving quick toward the maritime provinces of Canada. One more lobe of moisture can create another batch of showers Saturday night, and then as this system pulls away Sunday, expect a dry but windy, cool day with a sun/cloud mix.

TODAY: Mostly cloudy to partly sunny. A few passing showers south of I-90. Highs 60-67. Wind SW up to 10 MPH.

TONIGHT: Clearing. Patchy ground fog. Lows 45-52. Wind SW under 10 MPH.

THURSDAY: Mostly sunny. Highs 62-69. Wind SW 5-15 MPH.

THURSDAY NIGHT: Partly cloudy. Patchy fog. Lows 52-59. Wind S up to 10 MPH.

FRIDAY: Mostly cloudy. Isolated to scattered rain showers probable. Highs 61-68. Wind S 5-15 MPH.

FRIDAY NIGHT: Mostly cloudy. Scattered to numerous rain showers likely. Areas of fog. Lows 54-61. Wind SE 5-15 MPH becoming variable under 10 MPH.

SATURDAY: Mostly cloudy. Episodes of rain showers. Highs 58-65. Wind SW up to 10 MPH, shifting to W and increasing to 5-15 MPH late-day.

SATURDAY NIGHT: Mostly cloudy. Additional rain showers possible. Lows 45-52. Wind W 10-20 MPH.

SUNDAY: Sun/cloud mix. Highs 53-60. Wind NW 10-20 MPH, gusts 25-35 MPH.

DAYS 6-10 (OCTOBER 23-27)

Dry weather, below normal temps early next week, breezy at first then less wind. Fair, milder mid to late week but a frontal boundary may approach the region with a rain shower chance by the end of the period.

DAYS 11-15 (OCTOBER 28 – NOVEMBER 1)

Dry weather, below normal temps early in the period, then fair and milder as high pressure dominates, then another trough may bring unsettled weather by the end of the period.

38 thoughts on “Wednesday October 18 2023 Forecast (7:27AM)”

  1. A haiku
    Rain rain go away
    Everything is wet and gross
    Summer wasn’t great,

    Just rain now it’s cold
    Everything is meh
    Winter take us now.

    Mother Nature mad
    Her children the enemy
    She’s out to get us.

  6. TK, thank you for the forecast and thanks for last Saturday’s forecast too. I meant to say that earlier in the week!

  7. U.S. media have become as polarized as society. This pertains to everything from climate change to the war in the Middle East. It’s really hard to get balanced coverage on any topic.

    If I sound like an old curmudgeon, well so be it. News was presented in a more balanced way when I was younger. And hot topics didn’t take on the same amount of political baggage. Sure, there was always a political tinge to everything. But when we read about events or news items in newspapers or watched the reports on TV we got a sense that facts were being presented. Nowadays, I’m often unsure if what I’m being told is a fact or not. There’s often heavy duty political spin these days, on practically everything the media cover. It even infects the language used by reporters, journalists and anchors.

    2. I absolutely agree that truth is twisted in a whole different way than in our past. And unlike picking up a newspaper and being able to put it down as we once did, news is screaming at us no matter which way we turn, repeatedly throughout the day. The world is a mess. Our country is equally a mess. We’ve been close to ending the grand experiment before. I just don’t think this close.

      1. There is a part of this country that CLEARLY wants to
        put a complete END to Democracy or at least Democracy as we used to know it.

        We cannot allow this to happen, else we become another Russia, China or North Korea!!!!!

  12. Thanks TK. A miserable set up for the weekend. Looks likes a triple point low but at least it explodes further north of us. Can we save some of these for winter please?

        1. Ugh. Good luck. Horse show Sunday but indoors…not that all horses and riders warming up can be inside. But Sunday looks to be better than Saturday.

  13. One of those silly things I remember from junior high French:

    Il pleut, il mouille,
    C’est la fête à la grenouille.

    [It is raining, it is getting wet,
    It is party time for the frog.]

  16. Quasi-stationary cold pool aloft has had a big hand in some of the best cloud formations the last few days. It’s been fun to watch both visually and on satellite.

  17. Tropical Storm Tammy has formed in the Atlantic, and she will move across the northern Lesser “Ant Hills” (Antilles, old joke) on Saturday before curving north and northeast over open ocean. NBD for the most part.

      1. While I absolutely respect gender choice and will always use a persons choice of pronouns, when a weather system personally asks for a specific pronoun, then and only then will I go with he and she 🙂

      2. In that case, the naming system is contradicting itself, going out of the way to alternate, when it doesn’t matter. They should just go to a numbering system at this point. 🙂

        Avoids all confusion. 😉

        Year / storm type (depression, TS, hurricane or whatever term is applicable, and storm number). I’ve actually kind of wished they’d do something like this for years. Now I think it’s even a better idea than I did previously. 🙂

        2023 Tropical Storm 20-whatever. Perfect. 🙂

        Or how about this, since it was later determined that the January system was indeed a STS but they never named it, and the first one was Arlene a few months later, they couldn’t call it TS Negative Arlene, so here’s another good example for needing a # system. Subtropical Storm -1. Just don’t try to take its square root. Oh wait, maybe just STS Zero, but then people would think it’s the Z name, and Z doesn’t come before A.

        This is all really silly now isn’t it………………………..forget it. 🙂 I’ll just skip the pronouns. This world is weird.

  18. Trying to map out our weekend and curious about the amount of rain forecast for metro west and the wind speed on Sunday. I know it’s still a little early. Thanks.

    1. I’ll take a stab at it. I think about 1/2 inch of rain will fall in the region Friday night, and less than 1/4 inch the rest of the time.

      Not much wind Friday or Saturday really because the parts that make up the storm are still in the process of coming together. Once that happens and the storm starts to crank beyond the region, we’ll get back side wind with gusts in the 25-35 MPH range on Sunday and Sunday night. The stronger gusts will be confined to the highest elevations and the coastal plain.

  19. A late evening hole in the clouds in east central to northeastern MA allowed a little bit of rad cooling and some of the ground fog patches have been shallow but really dense. I was driving through some areas where the vis would go from no problem to near zero to no problem to near zero again over a distance of under 1/4 mile.

  20. It’s interesting watching the models try to pin down the evolution of the 500 mb feature that is the weekend system.

    Kudos to TK, who for days has predicted it’s far far less than a weekend washout.

    The models continue to throw out different scenarios of that general idea. Kind of humorous, as usual.

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