Monday: All Eyes (Not Literally) On The Eclipse Today, Pleasant Rest of Week

Good morning. Well, the big news item today will be the total solar Eclipse that will occur this afternoon. Granted, in our neck of the woods we only will get about 70% of the Eclipse but some areas down south get to see the full one. You can click here to see more info on this. Peak viewing is around 2:44pm for our area today.

So how will the weather be for proper viewing? Overall not too bad. We will have some scattered cloud cover to deal with especially in western NJ and PA but my forecast is for mostly sunny skies for areas more to the east. Model projections show this well..

Notice areas of some denser clouds but the overall region looks ok. If you happen to miss it, you will have to wait till 2024 to get your next chance.

Moving on, we look to have an overall nice week on tap. Things will start off warm today and Tuesday with temperatures in the uppers 80s today and possibly low 90s tomorrow. Humidity will also be on in the increase tomorrow with a few isolated thunderstorms.

On Wednesday relief comes as a front will approach from the west...

The speed and timing of this front is a little hard to nail down but it looks to pass earlier in the day. This means less chance at widespread showers and storm as the air will not be a destabilized from daytime heating. Regardless, I would put the chance at showers in the forecast for Wednesday as the timing of the front can change. 

In the wake of this front we will have beautiful fall like weather for Thursday through the weekend as high pressure and a northwest flow dominates the region. You can see the pocket of cooler air below..

Should really be a great period to be outside.

Taking a look at the longer range weather, it looks like this persistent pattern of cooler than normal weather will dominate through the rest of August. You can see models below continue to show the persistent pattern of a rise of the jet stream in the west (red) and a dip in the jet stream in the east (blue). Also notice the high pressure or red over Greenland. this pattern also enhances the cooler than normal weather for our part of the country. If this was the winter we would have quite the action to talk about...

Will the winter look anything like this? Find out in October when I release my winter outlook 2018.

We will also have to watch the tropics over the next month as model indicate things really can start heating up (hurricane season). Stay tuned!