All Eyes Still on Isaac.

All eyes continue to focus on Isaac, not only for the short term in relation to its impacts along the Gulf Coast, but longer term for the potential impacts on our weather. The guidance continues to push the remnants further west with each update cycle which has obvious implications regarding how wet/dry we will be for the Friday/Saturday time period.

More about that later, but for the short term we will have above normal daytime temperatures for the next several days at least. Look for afternoon temperatures to be well into the 90s for today through Thursday under mostly sunny skies. At least dew point temperatures have dropped into the lower 60s and with fair overnight skies and light easterly winds, the late night and early morning hours will be quite pleasant with morning temperatures falling back into the 60s. That is a bit below normal. So warmer than normal daytime highs and somewhat cooler than normal morning lows all add up to some decent late summer weather for us over the next few days.

As mentioned, the winds at night will be light and from a general NE to E direction. During the day, the winds will pick up to 8-15 mph with perhaps a few higher gusts and also from a general NE to E direction. That will be the case at least into the day Thursday; after that, things get a little muddled due to the uncertainty regarding the ultimate destiny of Isaac.

The official track from the National Hurricane Center keeps the center of circulation well east of us, but as the map on the right shows, there is a lot of spread in the potential solutions offered by the various computer models. In fact, some of the more recent solutions bring the remnants right over our state on Friday. Typically, the heavier rainfall from a tropical system will be on the eastern side of the circulation, but there are exceptions. At any rate, have started trending the rain chances up and the temperatures down for Friday into Saturday and those numbers may change even more. As Alan mentioned in his excellent morning discussion, once the system gets inland and into a better observational network, then the various solutions should show much better convergence instead of such a wide spread as we are seeing now.

So, stay tuned and check back for updates.

Dick Faurot