While we’ve had our bouts of high heat and high humidity so far this summer, we haven’t had too many rounds of showers, storms and downpours. In fact, from Jun 1st to today, it’s the driest stretch during that timeframe for Boston on record with only 2.26″ of rain falling over the last 10 weeks. Over the next 7 days, that’ll change.
It’s not a lock that every town in drought stricken New England gets a good dose of water, but it’s the best pattern for more widespread downpours that we’ve seen in a while.
Let’s start with today… showers and storms that rumble across New York early this morning work into southern New England today. They’ll be most widespread mid to late morning to midday. It won’t rain the whole day, and any breaks in the action early to mid afternoon will allow temps to nudge up into the lower to middle 80s. That daytime heating adds a bit of instability to the atmosphere and could helps re-fire a few scattered late afternoon storms too. Overall, have the umbrella handy today, but also expect some periods of dry weather too. The main threat with any storm today is locally heavy rain. Those localized downpours may produce a quick 1″ or so of rain in some towns, while other towns see little if any appreciable rains. Bottom line, it’s summer and rain totals can vary widely from town to town. The map form WeatherBellAnalytics shows that wide variation. (Not an exact match with what’ll happen, but a good example of how downpours are localized)
I don’t expect much rain tomorrow, but I do expect plenty of heat. Highs hit the mid 90s with dewpoints in the 70s. As Jimmy Fallon would say… “ewww”. The combination of the heat and humidity push heat indices near/above 100, prompting a heat advisory that’s in place for much of eastern Mass away from the immediate coast.
Friday and Saturday feature heat and humidity with a few afternoon storms firing. The atmosphere will be loaded with moisture, allowing locally heavy rain. Storms are likely more widespread Saturday afternoon/evening vs. Friday.
The front laid up to our north inching closer to southern New England Saturday, allowing for those PM showers/storms, will slide into and just south of southern New England Sunday and Monday. That’ll knock temps back into the 70s to near 80, but more importantly, also allow for rounds of showers and storms to work through. I don’t expect it to rain the whole time, however, the atmosphere will have a tremendous amount of water vapor in it, allowing for these batches of storms to produce locally heavy rain.
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