Low humidity, cool temps and clear skies start today, so we’re good right? Well, not quite. An anomalously cold pocket of air aloft is traversing through New England. That creates quite a bit of instability once the day time heating gets going, and it won’t take long to get going.
Late morning, through the afternoon, we’re fair game for some of these showers and storms to pop. With a very cold air mass aloft and low freezing levels, gusty winds and small hail is possible with some of these storms. Additionally, you’ll notice temps dramatically drop with any downpour that passes by. With that said, these showers/storms are in and out, so we get our dry hours too.
The cold pocket of air aloft leaves us for the weekend, and a great stretch of weather settles in with low humidity and highs in the mid to upper 70s at the coast and low to mid 80s inland.
In the tropics….
A lot of has been made of the threat to Hawaii over the last couple of days. Right now, I expect Iselle to make landfall over the Big Island as either a tropical storm, or minimal category 1 hurricane tonight. A lot of storms tend to weaken while approaching the Big Island from the east, so it’ll be interesting to see how much this weakens today and what the highest wind speeds are that get clocked on the Big Island. The 2nd hurricane, Julio, likely misses the islands as it weakens, brushing by as a tropical storm.
In regards to Iselle, wind damage is possible across the Big Island, but won’t be as likely across the other Islands. Scattered power outages certainly may be an issue out there, but overall, the main threat to the islands will be heavy rain. Elevation changes are steep across the Islands, and heavy rain will likely produce flash flooding issues, mudslides and washed out roads in some communities, especially over the mountainous terrain.
If you have vacation plans down the line from the Big Island to Maui to Kauai, many of the coastal resorts will avoid significant structural damage from wind and storm surge, unlike what Iniki did back in 1992 to Kauai. Damage to coastal resorts around Poipu Beach was devastating. Iselle is not Iniki. damagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Iniki
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