LABOR DAY WEEKEND WEATHER OUTLOOK

Hurricane Dorian is currently forecast to approach the eastern Florida coastline sometime Monday.  The  hurricane-specific models and their variants (and there are many of them)  have quite a spread  with the prediction of landfall locations but landfall somewhere around Cape Canaveral, Florida is currently forecast on Monday.

The model error-tracking done at the NCAR  (National Center for Atmospheric Research) in Colorado shows all models to have current errors in predicting the position of this storm of at least 50-60 miles over the past 24 hours. Errors in predicting the location of Dorian over the past 48 hours have been over a 100 miles off.   So accuracy is not there yet with this storm track, regardless of model.

The reason I bring up Hurricane Dorian is not because it will directly affect us over the weekend. But there will be indirect effects.

My experience with weather over many years has led me to notice that a strong tropical system in the western Atlantic seems to bring havoc to model forecast accuracy here.  I don’t know why that happens but there’s some effect. 

As a result, confidence in the model weekend forecast is somewhat lower than usual.

Already, a weekend that had been looking quite beautiful just a few days ago is now looking to have significant high, thin cloudiness, especially on Sunday and Monday.

Saturday appears to be the nicest day, especially from Philadelphia south and east.

Some scattered showers are possible on Sunday.   The humidity might be higher than currently forecast.

I’ll take a better stab at the forecast on Friday.   Expect changes in the forecast this weekend.