Saturday, July 20, 2013

2:30 PM Update: Storms Starting to Develop Ahead of Cold Front


Day 7 of the heat wave will be the last day, as a strong frontal boundary is slowly marching south east, bringing with it some much needed relief from the heat and humidity.

Clear skies have lead to decent daytime heating once again, with surface temperatures over 90 degrees across all of SNE. Dew points remain quite high as well, in the low 70's for most. This has lead to a quickly destabilizing low level atmosphere, which will promote favorable conditions for thunderstorm growth towards late afternoon.


The current radar over SNE shows these storms starting to pop along a secondary frontal boundary draped from Cape Ann back west through Worcester county as noted below in the red circle.



As the main cold front continues to push to the south, storms will continue to develop along this secondary boundary, especially in areas along and to the south of the Mass pike. As shown below, these areas have the steepest low level lapse rates, which makes these locations the most favorable for storm growth.


The storms this afternoon will feature heavy rain, thunder, lightening with the outside chance of small hail and damaging straight line winds. As they approach the coast, they will begin to become somewhat scattered in nature, as opposed to the organized line form they are currently in.

I will update as the afternoon goes on. In the Boston area, expect some wet weather sometime after 5, with much of the action clearing the metro area by 8.


No comments:

Post a Comment