Rain is on the Way

So, what happened to our sunny, dry weather? The sun disappeared when the winds shifted around and started blowing from the east –right off the cold Atlantic. A giant ridge of high pressure has parked itself over the Canadian Maritimes and is blocking the atmosphere from moving eastward across the country. If a balloon were released in Seattle today it wouldn't follow I-90 across to Boston before flying out to sea. Instead it would take a hard right over the Dakotas, plunge as far south as the Gulf of Mexico, scoot over to the Carolinas, take a hard left up the eastern seaboard, continue north over Vermont, Quebec and Baffin Bay before taking another right over the top of Greenland, before finally plunging south into the Mid-Atlantic. A 4,000 mile trip in only 10,000 miles! Kind of like a large-scale version of trying to drive across Bergen County.

The end result is several days of cloudy and cool weather. Tonight and tomorrow should see some fog and drizzle, with showers becoming more likely late tomorrow. Friday and Saturday are looking like rainy days. Time to do what you've been putting off while the weather was nice. The extended forecast also looks wet, or at best unsettled. Weather.com has rain in the forecast for the next ten days.

On the bright side, winds off the ocean mean the pollen count is way down. Tree pollen was still in the high concentration category in Brooklyn this morning, but nothing like the off-the-scale concentrations last week. It is so nice to no longer feel like clawing our eyes out. If we do get rain over the weekend it'll knock a whole lot more pollen out of the air.

Festively colored temperature forecast map that we saved at a really poor level of quality from the Rapid Update Cycle model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research