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600 dm heights/ridges can and are misleading as to heat. It depends on many factors, like one's relative position to the ridge center/axis, overall moisture in and around the high pressure (not all high pressures are dry), mean wind direction, and how the surface pressure is set up/aligned and how strong it is, and time of year/location (land or ocean). And we do not live at 500 mb. And what you say above, a 600 dm ridge parked right over region is not ideal for max or record heat. Having its center located decent distance SW, S , or SE of a given location is best for an area like the East Coast. On 9/16/1989 at 00z, the Chatham MA (CHH) souring recorded a 609 dm height. That is record high for the Northeast, but there was no all-time record heat for Sep from that event on the East Coast. Aug 2, 1975 when New England has it hottest temp on record. The ridge center was to our W, and we had strong NW flow for subsidence warming. Highest 500 heights were our W. Many times when the ridge center is to the W, the downstream sfc high is strong and that promotes a cooler thickness column and onshore winds. In other words, it is not one-size-fits all, and using any one parameter or level to determine sensible wx at the sfc and how extreme it will be or not is not proper meteorology. For heat, one should be looking a lot more at the 1000-500 thickness, as that is much more correlated to temps at the sfc b/c it combines 500 heights w/ sfc pressure. Also, 850 temps, but even that has limits. Cloud cover? Precip? Lapse rates? Type of air mass? You can't treat individual parameters in a vacuum.

Yes, @MN Transplant posted the LWX statement this morning in his "our regions extreme run" thread

Funny. Also contributing is that they apparently have been serving lettuce tainted by the parasite that is causing long term explosive watery diarrhea. Lovely.

I wanted to make a post about this last fall, never got around to it. Watching a super nino develop now, and drinking some surfside iced tea's, I feel compelled once again to bring up something that's kind of interesting. Perhaps a clue that a super nino would have been on the horizon the following year? I thought the severely negative IOD last year was quite interesting. I had found a paper at that time discussing purely very strong negative IOD events. Diversity of strong negative Indian Ocean dipole events since 1980: characteristics and causes https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-023-07008-x Notice the years where the strongest of negative IOD events occurred... It's really interesting to me how 3 out of 4 of those years came on the heels of very respectable el nino years. But one however did not, and that one occurred the year prior to a super el nino. That one occurred prior to 97-98. They noted that three of those events are attributed to monopole events (mainly the warmth in the east). Not surprising, these three are the ones following the respectable el nino years. The one year that was an actual dipole and featured the cooling in the west in conjunction with the warming in the east. Had the super el nino the following year (97-98). Unlike the others. The authors attribute that lone occurrence to local processes (in the IO) mainly. The other monopole cases are attributed to WWB in the IO which have links to enso. So when we look at last years case, what is the prognosis of that one? Clearly, there was no respectable el nino the year prior. Clearly, it was of the dipole variety in the sst anomaly data (image below). So it's interesting as hell to me watching this super el nino developing now. Potentially record breaking at that, following after a type of negative IOD which only really matches the year prior to 97-98. (I think the PDO is a major difference from that year specifically. May try to dig into that more later) Cheers.

I monitor my dad's solar array and this is exactly the case.

Solar power was about 70-75% of what it would have been without smoke

Yep. My yard is as bad as yours since the beginning of March. I pay no attention to the predictions of an inch or more from NWS/WPC a couple days out, because it is not going to verify. At some point the Nino coupling to the atmosphere will take over and this awful dry pattern will shift- but not likely for another month or so.

IAD did get it's first 80F low yesterday - did LWX make a note about that? It's pretty insane. Yes the area has become more urbanized, but still.

Yeah there was that, but also some drier air moving from NE to SW. That dry line triggered the training storms over Jersey. The cell that developed and moved southeastward over your area could have been related to that, but weaker and on a a smaller scale.

Now...imagine if it were a large forest of cannabis plants that was burning, how would we all feel?

@Gawx

Good point. Yes, it does matter to an extent. But each site is different. The below sounds pedantic and getting into the weeds, but I have found an appreciation of the details working w/ numbers, calcuations, and statistics, their rules, and how it applies to the sciences. We know the history of BOS wx measuring issues -- temp, precip, and snowfall. So this is not an isolated or new issue. And then you have the base issue of ASOS temp considered ok as long as it is within +- 2 F. The point is marginal of error or uncertainty in measurement is rarely given in the mainstream. Output/results are often treated as absolute fact. This is not a good scientific practice. For example, If a number is known to be accurate to the ones place (whole number), expressing it with a decimal (like a tenth) introduces false precision. This implies you know the value more precisely than you actually do. So since ASOS is only reliable within +-2 F, see the problem here? And then you have individual site calibration issues at times independent of the sensor base accuracy. These wx sensors in the field are not high quality super precise like sensors used in a lab. And a larger issue not directly related to precision/accuracy, artificial heat sources are becoming more of an issue w/ time, both on a local and large scale where many of these climate locations are, so biased warm is not an unreasonable assumption a lot the time. Yes I know this complicates things, but if you are going to say that an avg temp over a long period of time is exceeded a previous record by tenths of a degree when you have issues like the above, we can't just ignore the limits of measurements and rules of what is precise/accurate. It gets worse when you see temps calculated out to the hundredths of a degree (global avg temp, as one example) That is two orders of magnitude above conventional sensor precision!

A bit like Andy Dufresne (in "Shawshank Redemption"...one of my favorite films!) crawling through 500 yards of sh*t-smelling foulness I can't possibly imagine!!

We couldn't even manage one day with decent dewpoints. IAD up to 70 already. Sheesh.

No large pines that I could see, at least around Russ Pt Road. Definitely some branches. It's always nerve-wracking watching them swaying near our cabin in strong winds.

Agree. Things change, and improved knowledge (and medical understanding/advances) can help save lives and/or keep you from getting sick or adversely affected. I've never been a fan of the "we never whined about such-and-such and came out OK, now everyone's a wimp!" attitude (when in fact many people did NOT come out so OK). Yeah, some complaints about "how difficult it is" that I hear on minor or more trivial issues makes me roll my eyes, but in general, I totally get it. As for the conditions today, it's totally ugly out there. You can literally smell the smoke and feel it in your eyes and sinuses. Remarkable how the visibility is notably lowered too. Thank goodness I didn't have to be out for any length of time in this. I'm not sure how this compares to a couple of years back when we had a similar event with wildfire smoke that got into this area. Regardless, it's pretty bad.

Snagged a micro spud

Forecast of storms / rain tomorrow already cut down to 60% from 80% this morning. Another dud incoming.

Another Aleutian ridge! Since the El Nino began, N. Pacific ridge vs troughs lasting 5 days more more: 6-0. July will likely be the 6th consecutive month of -PNA

We got a letter to stop watering immediately. Then they reversed the decision and said that was only for the Hamptons. Now for us it’s odd/even day stuff.

I've always wanted to do that. In Mt. Shasta, CA the mountain clears completely in the Summer, then in September/October huge amounts of snow start piling up on the top. How cool would it be to camp on top of that mountain when the first 4-8' falls? It's easy to climb to.

And this not far over the ME border in 1825? One of largest wildfires in NAMR history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1825_Miramichi_fire You go back far enough in recorded history, you see that massive events are not as unusual or atypical as they may seem.

recent days have demonstrated how smoke vs clean air can lower ground-level air temperatures