A Good Weekend Afterall?

Today we really dodged a bullet. The heaviest of the rainfall was on the South Coast of New England and on Long Island this morning. The rain came down so heavily in New York City that it caused many roadways to flood and cause traffic nightmares on the freeways. Parts of Long Island saw between 3-5" of rainfall, that pretty much fell in a 2-3 hour timeframe. There was also an EF 1 tornado in one small town on Long Island. That heavy rain and thunder extended almost to the South Coast of CT and RI and exited off the Cape and Islands with a little heavier rainfall, but not what they saw in New York City and Long Island. Just imagine if that rain and thunderstorm band was just a little farther up to the north to affect the Worcester, Providence, and Boston metro areas. It would have been a soggy mayhem here with major traffic tieups. Instead, much of SNE just saw a 1/2" to 3/4" of rainfall. To the north of the city, less than a 1/4" fell.

Tomorrow will not be a wet day. In fact there will be extended sunny breaks that will be all enough to proprell that temperature into the lower to mid 80's. There is a chance of isolated thunderstorms in the afternoon, but they will be few and far between and on the move from west to east as well. If you get under a thunderstorm tomorrow, it wouldn't last more than 15 minutes, with heavy rain and sun thunder and lightning. Then it would clear out and the sun would likely come back out. It does not look like a situation that a Watch would be necessary.

More rain with the final front will come through sometime on Friday. The exact timing of the front is unknown at this time, but it would be sometime during the day on Friday. Accompanying the front, there will be rain and thunderstorms that will move through southern New England, that looks to amount to no more than a 1/2" to 3/4" of rain again regionwide with up to 1"+ in some areas that have more influence from thunderstorms. It now looks like that front will keep on moving on out to sea and not stall of the Cape and generate low pressure systems with heavy rains as it looked yesterday.

Instead, it looks like the front will safely clear the coast late Friday night and early Saturday morning to have clearing likely taking place first thing on Saturday morning from west to east. By early afternoon on Saturday, I would expect all places in SNE to be under at least partly cloudy skies. Sunday looks to be a mainly dry day as well, leading to warming temperatures early next week.

Thats all for tonight, more tomorrow.