WASHINGTON — The summer has its doldrums and sometimes fall can, too. The WTOP listening area will be in a mostly northwesterly wind flow pattern with the jet stream winds aloft and at the surface, also, meaning few chances for precipitation as a few quick moving disturbances go through the area.
The first will be a weak cold front on Monday, which will pass through without much more than several hours of cloudiness, and possibly a passing shower or sprinkle in northern Maryland and central Pennsylvania. The mountains will make most of the showers dry up and fall apart as the front goes through here. It will, however, keep the wind speeds up, making for a brisk day. The front is “strong” inasmuch as chillier air will move in behind it Monday night, making Tuesday’s temperatures more difficult to recover despite sunshine. After all, sun angle is getting pretty low and with less solar energy reaching the ground, temperatures won’t warm up too quickly.
High pressure building over New England will keep the cool flow going all the way through midweek. Toward Thursday and Friday, as the high moves away, we will be tracking a system lifting out of the Rockies up through the Plains. At this early stage in the game, it’s unclear whether showers will arrive with the front Thursday evening or early Friday morning. But experience shows these systems tend to be a little quicker than the computer models suggest, so Storm Team 4 is leaning toward Thursday evening and ending Friday morning, followed by another brisk Friday afternoon. Rainfall amounts do not look like they will be much, regardless.
And we could use some rain, which is definitely hard to believe considering all the flooding that Hurricane Matthew caused in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, and both North and South Carolina. We just didn’t get that much. Even by dry October standards, we are at 0.87 inches, which is 1.64 inches below average.
The total since Sept. 1 is 3.37 inches, which is 2.86 inches below average. And the annual total is 28.30 inches, which is 4.33 inches below average. Of course, we don’t need the rain so much for this year’s agriculture anymore, but dry topsoil, leaves and brush would eventually lead to wildfire dangers. Also, if the dry conditions were to continue through the winter months, we would eventually have groundwater and stream/riverflow problems next spring.
Daily weather highlights
Monday
- Morning batches of clouds
- Increasing sunshine through the afternoon
- Brisk winds picking up during the day, subsiding overnight
Tuesday & Wednesday
- Abundant sunshine
- Unseasonably cool
- Frost potential in the mornings along the mountain valleys and Maryland counties that border Pennsylvania
Thursday
- Increasing clouds; possibly cloudy already by sunrise
- Unseasonably cool all day
- Showers arriving in the evening if not earlier in the afternoon
Friday
- Showers ending by midday
- Windy, brisk and cool
EDITOR’S NOTE: The WTOP Workweek Weather Blog is intended as an in-depth yet plain language summary of the business week’s weather potential in the D.C. area along with an explanation of the contingencies and uncertainties that exist at the time of publication. For the latest actual Storm Team 4 forecast, check out WTOP’S weather page.
