After a beauty of a Thursday weather-wise, we’ll follow it up with an encore as temperatures warm to near 80 degrees this afternoon with mostly sunny skies and lower humidity. Top 10 day? Many may agree to that. Weak sea breezes do kick in mid to late afternoon, keeping beach temps in the mid to upper 70s, but still a nice day to spend some time in the sand.
While upper 70s to near 80 is fairly seasonal for this time of year, temperatures will actually be trending up through the weekend, into early next week. As we end the month of August and start September next week, temps hover near 90 in the afternoon with increase humidity. The forecast also looks mainly dry, however, I can’t rule out the slight chance for a few towns picking up on a passing shower/storm Sunday or Monday. I wouldn’t rearrange plans over this, much of the area and much of the time is rain free.
In the tropics, Tropical Storm Erika continues it’s movement off to the west to northwest this morning, bringing rain to Puerto Rico, which has been in a drought recently. While the rain can be beneficial to the Island, and other parts of the Caribbean, too much, too fast can cause flash flooding like what we saw in Dominica yesterday. Erika will head toward Hispaniola later today, bringing rain to parts of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. While sustained winds are now 50mph, any significant strengthening will likely be tough to occur the next couple of days as Erika fights wind shear and land interaction with Hispaniola, which has 7,000-10,000 foot mountain tops. With this track in mind (farther south and west from yesterday’s), the National Hurricane Center’s forecast for Erika near or over Florida is to remain a tropical storm . Still some uncertainty is there with this system, and while the track/strength forecast will likely be tweaked again, it does not appear to be a storm that’ll run up the east coast and become a concern for us. As high pressure continues to flex it’s muscle around the Northeast section of the County, it’ll block this storm to the south for a while to come.
Have a great day and great weekend ahead.
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