Thursday Forecast

40 Comments

7:33AM

DAYS 1-5 (SEPTEMBER 20-24)
The winds will make “the rounds” the next couple days, northerly today as drier air moves in, easterly tonight ahead of a warm front, southerly Friday behind the warm front, westerly Friday night as a cold front approaches, then back to northerly Saturday as a new air mass arrives from Canada. The weather will change with the winds and the passage of these fronts. High pressure settles in with nice early autumn weather later in the period. Forecast details…
TODAY: Partly sunny. Highs 63-69. Wind N up to 10 MPH.
TONIGHT: Mostly cloudy. Risk of a shower overnight. Lows 55-62. Wind light E.
FRIDAY: Mostly cloudy with passing showers morning. Partly cloudy afternoon. Highs 73-79. Wind S increasing to 10-20 MPH.
FRIDAY NIGHT: Variably cloudy. Overnight showers and possibly a thunderstorm. Lows 62-68. Wind W 10-20 MPH, higher gusts.
SATURDAY: Risk of a shower early otherwise sun and passing clouds. Highs 68-75. Wind N 5-15 MPH.
SUNDAY: Mostly sunny. Lows from the middle to upper 50s. Highs from the middle 60s to lower 70s.
MONDAY: Partly sunny. Lows from the middle 40s to lower 50s. Highs in the 60s.

DAYS 6-10 (SEPTEMBER 25-29)
Warm air returns early in the period lead in by showers then gets pushed back out again by a couple fronts producing shower threats later in the period followed by a shot of cooler/drier air.

DAYS 11-15 (SEPTEMBER 30-OCTOBER 4)
Early call is for a drier/cooler September 30 then an early October warm-up as the progression looks rather quick in the pattern.

40 thoughts on “Thursday Forecast”

  2. Thanks TK!

    Lowell is considering eliminating February and April vacations replacing them with one week in March as well as extending school day hours.

  6. Thanks TK.
    HUGE GRAIN OF SALT here with this tweet from meteorologist Ben Noll. EURO season update 500 hPA anomalies. Here are the takeaways for the upcoming winter.
    -A busy winter across the southern tier.
    -A good deal of late winter blocking.
    -A mild winter NW.
    -February: if you build this upper pattern, the nor’easters will come.

    1. Sounds like this Winter has much more uncertainty than most.
      When TK says he perplexed, then that speaks volumes.
      Perhaps all is not lost for a snowy Winter, not that most people would
      want that. just sickos like me. 😀

        1. Well that may be a safe prediction.

          I thought you were going to say that Boston would receive more snow than average this Winter. Now that would
          have been a bolder prediction. 😀

          1. LOL!!! I am not ready to go that far out on a limb. If I was forced to make a prediction right now I think for Boston if snowfall is below normal it won’t be by much and if snowfall is above normal it won’t be by much.

  8. With this winter, I am interested in how fast the ENSO goes positive especially since it has gone below zero for the first time since last winter, its still in neutral but on the other side of 0. All the models show it going to weak/moderate el-nino state and it starting in October, we shall see. The PDO is also some what in the air.

  9. Just checking ….

    A regular El Nino tends to have a winter pattern of an active southern jet with above average precip and below average temps in the southern US. In the northern US, it tends to be above average temps, with not necessarily a trend in precip ??

    And then, TK has been talking about a different version of El Nino, which I have never heard of before and do not know what has been seen with it in the past.

    1. its the modoki, which is basically when the 3.4 region shows a postive ENSO but 1+2 region off of peru gets cooler, with the east pacific also getting cool. Which makes the west coast dry and generally warmer than average. A little fun fact, this is the type of el-nino that is predicted to become more common as our oceans warm.
      Examples
      2002-2003
      2004-2005
      2009-2010

      2. Looking quickly, so I hope this is accurate ……

        Winters of Dec 02 – Mar 03 and Dec 04 – 05 had quite a bit of snow with some individual big storms.

        Winter of Dec 09 – Mar 10 had an above average Dec snowfall, then quieted down in Jan thru March 2010.

  10. We had a series of weak Modoki episodes in the 1980s which tended to produce cold/dry overall conditions. But I would have to dig deeper to find out what the other indices were.

    We always have to be careful to not let ONE index have too much influence on a longer range outlook.

    Regarding that tweet above, it’s no better than a coin flip about what they say regarding late winter blocking, because it’s based on a long range model that has a somewhere between so-so and decent track record on the general pattern, but is far from any certainty.

    1. I would say that the SE ridge is the key factor. It seems that once it sets up, it tends to be very stubborn to leave. No cold or snow events can happen.

      1. We can have cold and snow with a SE ridge. It’s just not usually done in the classic way. It’s done when you have a very compact flow between that ridge and a broad trough in eastern Canada and things are pushed far enough south to put New England on the cold side, and cold enough aloft to have snow versus ice/rain.

    1. Based ONLY and I stress only on what I have seen so far and what I feel may happen in the next 4 weeks, the first guess analog going into the winter is 2009-2010. Snow is early, but we do have cold more often than a typical El Nino winter. Again this is only based on the very early known and speculation about the upcoming. Don’t put a lot of stock in this right now.

  14. In these very early stages, I agree with TK that this winter is not an easy one to predict from a seasonal standpoint. El Nino has been slow to emerge, and it is not going to be anything like a couple years ago when El Nino was basically the sole driver of the global pattern. A Modoki event is definitely possible this time. I’m also growing more confident that the extremely high SSTs off the East Coast are going to play a major role at least in our local weather, and will likely influence the synoptic pattern as well. How does it all translate? For D-J-F as a whole, my early leaning is near to a little above normal temperatures and near normal precip/snow. But those thoughts will remain in flux and are really just a “safe starting point”.

  15. Towards the bottom are the Telloconnections and what they could do the next month, I could be dead wrong, but hey I am not willing to just read what the models are showing. https://merrimackvalleyweather796095653.wordpress.com/long-range-temperature-precipitation-prediction/
    Prediction for real fall will be posted tomorrow, my friend and I are in disagreement of whats going to happen later in the period. 🙂 I am looking at an early start of winter in late november/December, He thinks its gonna be a dry and some what warm November and warm December. Early thoughts on winter is that Active start and End, Overall slightly above normal temperatures, above normal precipitation. Around average Snowfall. Don’t hold me to it though its way to early, Winter forecasts that happen before October is over is usually nonsense.

  16. CPC updated. After looking at their maps and reading their discussions for 30-day, 90-day, and seasonal outlooks, I can see they are relying heavily on the unknown (hehe) in the 3 month period, but with a trend toward making the outlook a little colder overall than it had been for the Oct-Dec period and a trend toward drier then average weather as we head into the winter with temperatures equally likely to be slightly above or slightly below normal. Many will read this as near normal which is a reasonable assumption as well given the inherent uncertainty in long range forecasting before factoring in the unknowns of this season, the largest of which seems to be the relationship between ENSO and MJO and the latter’s impact on the former.

    Long way to go to figure this one out folks…

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