vortex95

Highest gust on record for the summer set in July 1996, correct? They had PL at the time IIRC. And I think this same storm system resulted in record flooding in Quebec.

Coldest I could find outside mtn location in New England is 47 at Fox Brook ME.

Recall during the Olympics in China, the smoke pollution was never called such? You would get official statements like, "it is mist" or "it is getting ready to rain."

I agree it is not as bad as 2018, but when you talking tenths of deg when it comes to exceeding records, it does matter, and the longer the period, the more this drift is a problem when talking avg temps. 1 F bias does not sound like much for a single day, but it is big over the course of a month, and keeps increasing the longer you go.

If it thick enough, it does. Put it this way on an ideal radiation cooling night, if there was a layer of thick smoke at 20,000 ft, do you really temps woild drops as low as if there was no smoke? Yes, the SW/LWIR physics are not the same as WV clouds, but it is still a cover, so to speak. Why did BOS only hit 90 on 7/14 when 97 was fcst?

Today it was DC's turn for thick smoke. VIS at KDCA got as low as 1.25 mi and VV restriction of only 200 ft! METAR KDCA 171252Z 00000KT 1 1/2SM FU VV020 28/17 A3007 RMK AO2 SLP183 T02780167" CoastalWx, remind you of doing TAFs for India? Every night, the VIS like clockwork would drops big time to 1/4 mi or less from smoke at so many airports, not from wildfires, but industrial pollution.

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.

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!

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.

Dang! That's quite a swirl, but largely at mid-levels. it looks like it is detaching itself from the main 500 low. We could see pinwheeling small LLCCs if the convection collapses completely.

A good part of the FL PH could use the rain!

I think thick smoke can go both ways. On Tue, big time svr wx (best SCP and SIGTOR parameters I have seen in a long time in the Northeast), was completely squashed during the daylight hours at least. Otherwise there would likely have been a sig tor event in srn Quebec and nrn New England. Temps were held down a lot. BOS fcst high as 97, and high was only 90. PWM fcst high was 93, and only got to 85. This resulted in CINH remaining stronger over the entire area. However, ydy we saw a nasty back-building tstm training event in cntrl NJ. Wind gusts as high as 84 mph at Surf City and they also had 4.37" of rain. CG LTG was incredibly dense in a narrow swath. And these storms fired directly within the thick plume of smoke. One can say w/ high confidence the smoke in the Northeast was the cause for the svr wx bust here, but for what happened in NJ ydy? Not as clear. That would be a good case study/research item, re-run models w/o the smoke, and see if intense tstms would have occurred to the degree they did! The models for tomorrow have smoke in their initialization, unlike what happened on Tue in the Northeast, so it is accounted for. I am not impressed w/ the 18z HRRR storm coverage tomorrow over the region. 18z RRFS is a little better, and shows an isolated honkin' supercell just N of DC, but the 45% area for wind seems high for the DMV area to me given the *coverage* of storms fcst. This is important. The colored SPC outlooks areas are for expected svr wx type coverage, they say nothing about how intense any individual svr wx may be (the hatched areas show that) So they should be solid svr storms, just the real question is coverage overall. The thick smoke may be a factor here, but how much in either direction? We go from weak anticyclonic flow aloft today to solid cyclonic flow tomorrow w/ a s/w coming thru. 500 heights come down as well. But the NAM shows 500 temps actually increase a bit in the aftn, up to -4 C (yuck!). The GFS tho shows slight cooling from -5 C tdy to -6 C tomorrow. Also, the mid-level lapse rates are not as bad as you would think for such warm 500 mb temps. Looking at the NAM and GFS, it shows lapse rates as high as 7 C/km on the fcst soundings (not using 700-500 exactly here, any thick layer at mid-levels will do). Fcst K-indices in the area gets as high as 40 on both the NAM and GFS, and that is impressive. Juiced column for big rains! NAM has PWATs are high as 2.8" which is likely overdone. GFS has it as high as 2.5" which is good for this model (not usually that high)! Anything over 2" is more than enough. Since DCAPE is fcst high and 0-3 km CAPE low, tor threat seems minimized. 0-6 km shear 35-40 kt, so enough for supercells.

Looking at the ECMWF fcst, it remains cold core aloft for the next several days (see 700 temp 48 hr fcst attached), and at 850 elongated N-S w/ a broad wind field (see 850 winds 60 hr fcst attached). Not much sfc low reflection. I think they may be a case that aloft it is and will stay impressive w/ lots of deep convection/decent swirl, but low-levels struggle to organize. We've seen this before and it looks great on satellite, and some ppl are going, "I can't believe NHC has not declared this yet!" But sfc observations and microwave data show a low-level center ill-defined and/or not tight.

Thick smoke was no inhibitor for the nasty training storms in cntrl NJ today. And look at that CG density even zoomed up! CoastalWx: "WHY CAN'T WE GET THAT HERE!?" visloop5.mp4