WEATHER BLOG: Heat Advisory

The hot and humid weather that most of the Eastern Region encountered yesterday will still manage to persist in the mid-Atlantic states today. Meanwhile, in the Northeast, while temperatures today won't be quite as high as yesterday afternoon, most will be in the 80s -- and also 5-10 degrees above the seasonal averages. Those thunderstorms which we had been talking about were not widespread, and the storm damage reports (all of which were attributed to strong wind gusts) which came out of the National Weather Service and compiled by the Storm Prediction Center were out of western and central Pennsylvania.

During the later half of the afternoon, there were two, separate clusters of thunderstorms that developed -- and each one drifted to the east along a weak cool front. The hardest hit areas were in central Pennsylvania and parts of the middle/upper Susquehanna River valleys. During the evening, one of the thunderstorm complexes did manage to hold together for a few hours before dying out over northern New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania before midnight.

Early today, many of us are waking up to temperatures in the upper 60s and 70s. It is also rather humid, and air-conditioners have gotten a real workout at night for the first time this season.

Therefore, we're going to have a fairly decent 'springboard' to work with as the day gets started. It will make experiencing summer-like warmth an absolute certainty again, with many thermometers in the region probably near or above 80 degrees by lunchtime. As we pointed out yesterday, while our chances for getting 'hit or miss' thunderstorms were pretty slim, we were even more convinced that there'd be little or nothing happening today in areas east of the Appalachians. This still appears to be the case, since a wave of low pressure on this morning's weather map is poised to move across the Great Lakes. Ahead of that weather system, a warm front will continue to lift northward into southeastern Canada.

So, the area which is referred to as the "warm sector" is typically void of any significant shower or thunderstorm activity. Can one or two of them be ruled out entirely, especially near some of the 'uneven', mountainous terrain? No, but in the larger cities and along the immediate coastline, opportunities for picking up showers and a heavier thunderstorm or two will be pushed back until late tonight and tomorrow.