Gradual Warmup Continues

Now

Sunny, warm. This afternoon's weather map shows a strong high pressure area dominating the eastern third of the U.S. with virtually no rain anywhere east of the Mississippi. The Washington metro area is enjoying temperatures generally in the low 80s with only slightly higher humidity indicated by dewpoints reaching into the upper 50s. The warming trend is likely to continue into the holiday weekend.

Tonight and Tomorrow

Mostly clear, warm. Lows tonight under mostly clear skies will range from the low 60s downtown to the mid and upper 50s in 'burbville. Tomorrow will be sunny and a little warmer, highs 84-87°.

For the outlook through the holiday weekend and beyond with Larson's Long-Range, scroll on down to Josh's post below.

Tropical Topics

With the official start of hurricane season a week from tomorrow, the USAT Weather Guys had a pointer yesterday to an interesting collection of tropical cyclone climatology charts at the National Hurricane Center website.

The statistical return period for Category 1 hurricanes in the Mid Atlantic area, shown to the right, is 5 years for the Outer Banks, but 15 years for Virginia Beach and 24 years for Ocean City. Also included on the web site are maps of the actual total number of strikes by county for the last 80 years. The strike data is derived from an NHC technical memorandum which is available for download from the National Hurricane/Tropical Prediction Center library. Caution: These mainly pre-WWW documents were apparently scanned into pdfs which means that they have multi-deca-megabyte file sizes (multi-hour downloads on a dialup connection).

Graphic from NOAA/NWS/NHC

Programming Note: PM Update will be taking a long weekend, so have a great holiday, everyone!