If you spent any time outside this afternoon you most definitely noticed the wind! It actually wasn’t bad this morning, up until about noon, then the wind cranked up for the second half of the day. There were pros and cons to the wind today:
-The pros: the southwest winds surged the warm air in and pushed temperatures for most of us to the 70s, including the coastline. With a strong enough westerly wind, it’s able to knock out the sea breeze and push the 70s right out to the water’s edge.
-The cons: mainly the fire risk. This time of year there’s a lot that already creates problems for fire risk and fire spread, but the strong wind makes an already vulnerable situation even worse.
While we are enjoying the nice weather today, the first and foremost concern is that fire danger. Massachusetts DCR reports 42 brush fires have started since Friday. This time of year is already vulnerable to brush fires with all the vegetation being dead from the winter and not green yet. Don’t confuse this with dry/drought though. Our precipitation year-to-date is right where it should be this time of year and the drought monitor doesn’t even have us considered “dry”, the lowest level on the map.
Aside from the dry vegetation, the warm temperatures and strong sunshine aid in the fire threat. The sun right now has the same strength as late August. In addition, humidity is really low, so there’s not even any moisture held in the air to slow the fire. Dew points are incredibly low and temperatures are high. That difference between the dew point and temperature is our relative humidity — right now it’s only around 15%. For perspective, when the 80s surge into New England for the end of the week, it’s going to bring more humid air with it. So despite temperatures in the 80s, the relative humidity will be higher — around 35%. Higher humidity and less wind for Friday will likely make our fire risk less than today despite the warmer temperatures.
The wind will be with us Wednesday and still to an extent on Thursday. So both of those days will likely still keep a higher fire risk around and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the red flag (or fire weather) warning extended to tomorrow and possibly even Thursday too.
Since we’re talking about the cons of the wind, we’ll just continue that theme with the pollen. Unlike the fire weather that is really driven by the wind, the allergy forecast is mostly driven by the sun and warm temperatures, though the wind doesn’t help things. The strong wind blows the pollen around (that’s what Mother Nature does to pollenate things!) and keeps our pollen counts incredibly high — or actually severe is a better description over the next 4 days.
Ok, enough with the bad news, how about some good news because today was B-E-A-UTIFUL! Temperatures climbed to the 70s for just about everyone. The strong west to southwest wind pushed the warm temperatures right to the coastline. That slight southerly component to the wind was enough to cool the Cape and Islands but it was still a beautiful day there too with temperatures in the 60s.
Boston recorded its first 70° day of the year today which is pretty much on par for average and almost spot on to last year. This year we did it on April 11th (today), last year was April 12th, and the average is April 2nd. So the overall takeaway is early April. However first 80° is a different story. That typically happens around May 1st, but with a strong enough wind on Thursday, we’ll likely send the 80s right out to the coast, including Boston.
The warm air is here to stay. The wind will be back again tomorrow, but this time from the northwest. It will have a lot of the same impacts as today — no sea breeze, high fire danger, but will knock just a few degrees off of our highs, likely topping out near 70° instead of in the 70s. From there we head to the 80s to finish off the week. We’ll likely knock out the sea breeze on Thursday, but the three days that follow all being “cooler coast” days with either a sea breeze developing or an onshore easterly wind.
