Hurricane Agnes

Yeah I think it's all the brick and stone around here that absorbs the heat and radiates it, especially if there is extended heat. I am probably about 150 ft from a strip of woods, but that is to my east and it would have probably made more of a difference if they were near the west side. If we hadn't had as much rain as we have had so far this year, then we would have certainly reached triple digits this summer, which will probably not happen this year given the pattern (unless the pattern does a major change and shuts off the faucet). AND... as I type this, I'm sitting at 90, with a 79 dp (that is bopping between 78/79).

I'm gonna need to put some boxes in the recycle bin and then run back in. Up to 89 here now, with some scattered clouds, and a dp of 78.

Barely after 8:30 am and already up to 85 here with a dp of 77. I'm afraid to go outside. I ended up with a 74 low this morning.

That "Moderate" risk is designation rare for around our CWA and a bit concerning. Currently 75 here with dp 71 and will find out later if that will be the low for this morning.

Made it up to 94 as a high for the day (so far but probably will be a final). This is the 21st 90+ high day IMBY since May, with 3 (non-consecutive) days in May, 11 days in June (including 2 heatwaves of 3 or more consecutive 90+s), and 7 in July (with what is now the 2nd heatwave of the month, with 3 or more consecutive 90+s). It's currently 91 with dp 70 and

LOL I had to get out there and do some light watering because I'm afraid if I do a deep water, then some cell will sit over the area tomorrow and unleash, and the plants will end up with yellow leaves. My "low" was 76 and I've already touched 89 this morning. Dews are moderate but it's currently sunny and 89 with dp 72.

I think a lot of where you see this issue too is with "port" cities in general that still have significant industrial land areas with sprawling facilities strung along the waterfronts. Those facilities generate jobs but they are rarely "landscaped" to include some green space. I think they are trying to remedy some of that down here across the river with Camden's waterfront that still has its docks and piers, but with some added park development around them (e.g., near the old RCA building that has been converted and the Campbell Soup factories that were imploded some time ago) - Here in Philly, William Penn envisioned a "Greene Countrie Towne", including four "Squares" as parks in the original city design - The squares are all still there almost 340 years later. But even with that, the industrial age came full bore and the city managed to keep them up and expanded them as the city expanded, while the industrial waste and pollution were killing our 2 rivers. Fortunately efforts were made to clean and begin to restore the rivers, and they continue to add more green areas. The one significant thing that I recall almost 20 years ago, was a work training trip to San Francisco, and the plane circling over the city before landing. I had never in my life seen an area so built-on and lacking trees than San Francisco. On the street level, yeah you have some street trees (mostly eucalyptus and old magnolias) but outside of Golden Gate Park (their equivalent to Central Park), it was jarring. Many of us here in Philly metro are under flight paths and if you have been on a plane circling overhead, you do see lots of wooded areas, particularly over the rim counties. But there, nope. Even NYC (not even counting Central Park) has the more "residential" boroughs with trees and little parks.

Looks like my high ended up being 93 and I'm currently partly cloudy and bopping between 88 & 89 with dp that has shot up to 74/75. I heard Glenn on KYW earlier and he said we're stuck in this until probably Monday. Mt. Holly has the heat headlines up but has forecast a bit of a moderating ("cooler") pattern change for the new week, with the WAR moving away and an incoming trough.

I saw Accuweather had an article on research done to look at the phenomena of the "urban heat island" - https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/how-these-5-cities-became-the-most-intense-urban-heat-islands/981815 The data came from an independent climate research organization named "Climate Central" - a group of scientists and journalists who do deep dives into weather-related climate data and release reports. In this case, one of the researcher's schools partners with NOAA to contribute their data to them. This particular report is here - https://medialibrary.climatecentral.org/resources/urban-heat-islands where they took a look at 159 cities across all 50 states and applied similar methodology originally developed by other researchers who had come up with a model to measure, evaluate, and generate what they dubbed an "urban heat intensity" value (used for select European cities based on the prevalence or absence of certain features including population, building heights/density, greenspace, etc.) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75018-4 Their report brief is here (PDF) - https://medialibrary.climatecentral.org/uploads/general/2021_UHI_Report.pdf The generic graphic of how they categorize environments is this - Accuweather posted the top 5 "urban heat islands" and the Climate Central site posted the top 20. Philly (and I suppose that might mean some its immediate adjoining rim communities) was in neither the "top 5" nor the "top 20" list. The higher the value, the more intense the heat island. So I had to dig and dig and did find a link to their data graphic and you can select a city here - https://www.climatecentral.org/outreach/alert-archive/2021/2021UHI.html (and the link includes the CSV spreadsheet file for the list of the cities and ranking). From the raw numerical list, Philly came in (alphabetically) at #37 and they had an option to generate a graphic - In actuality (looking at the spreadsheet list), since many of the cities were "tied" with other cities based on their scores (in our case listed as "6.29" in the spreadsheet and rounded up to 6.3 on the graphic), we were tied with 7 other cities for 13th place (if you group the ties and re-number). Renumbering based on lumping each of the groups of ties in their own single rank, yields a total of 21 rank slots. Interestingly, there were something like 62 cities tied for 15th place (with the rank renumbering). Believe it or not, using Climate Central's straight numeric ranking (not counting ties), Erie ended up in the top 20 and was the only PA city that showed up in that top 20. Using the renumbering would make it #9. Allentown came in at #40 (or #14 renumbered) - and Pittsburgh came in at #45 (tied with Allentown for a renumbered #14). For both NJ and DE, they only had 1 city each evaluated - Newark, NJ (#2 and also a renumbered #2) and Wilmington, DE (#27 or renumbered #11) - (*note that I am only displaying the graphics for the Philly Metro /Mt. Holly NWS cities)

Ha!!! That's been my problem. Too many "projects" and not enough time to devote to them if something "glitches" and ruins the flow. I have been doing the weewx stuff in the middle of re-doing my local network (I recently bought my own gateway/router and one of my trips this morning was to take the Comcast rental one back). So getting all the stuff set back up correctly and in the configuration that I want, is disrupting my progress.

See... that's what I've been doing fooling around with one of the home weather programs - weewx - which I have running on a little Raspberry Pi and that displays my PWS data with the Pi's local Apache webserver that I can connect to through a browser. To do it, I have a little Ecowitt GW-1000 guy that is listening for the data coming out of my PWS and its sensors, compiles and formats that data, and then loops it to weewx to generate the reports and graphs. I am still trying to tweak the thing, which involves modifying the text components of the config files. I added a quick snapshot of the top part of a page below showing some of the plots for the month to date so far. I can change the page colors, fonts, chart scales, etc., although I have been having an issue trying to get an alternate measurement unit recognized for the soil moisture sensor (which is defaulted to a unit that my sensors don't use). In general, I work on it for awhile and then something else demands my attention, so I stop, and eventually get back to it. Had to go out to run some errands this morning and although the dewpoint is "lower" (in quotes), it's still pretty brutal out there. Am currently partly cloudy and at 91 with dp 71.

My low this morning was 73 with none of the stratus/fog experienced the last 2 mornings. Am currently mostly sunny and up to 80, with a noticeably higher dp of 73 (although I understand it's progged to mix out later ahead of the blast to come tomorrow and over the weekend).

Final high for today was at 4 pm when I hit 92. It's currently mostly cloudy and 84 with dp 71.

Hit 91 as a high so far today although the dp did thankfully drop "down to 71" from an earlier 74. Currently 91, mostly cloudy with breaks of sun, and unsettled looking as the radar starts to light up.

Temp is up to 88 at noon, but the dp is "only 72" (and not 77/78) so... There are some ominous-looking cumulostratus passing overhead moving east but I know they are basically harmless.

The sun broke out "early" (vs yesterday) around 9:30, and the temp is now slowly creeping up. Currently mostly sunny with scattered cumulus and 78, with dp 73.

Yeah they have an option to reduce the size and I later realized how to edit the captured video to save just one initial multi-frame loop (which for a later attempt, was for 3 seconds covering about 12 frames) and then have it set to loop itself. Doing that would also allow a higher res version for not much difference in size. I have the super duper membership so I can actually upload up to 19 Mb-sized files (since I like doing the hurricane sat loops), but I know I can clear out some of the older stuff too. That one I posted was sortof testing doing it. My low this morning was 72 and I'm currently overcast and 75 with dp 73. We seem to be in a similar situation as yesterday morning (including fog here earlier), where we are mostly under the influence of the troughy part of the front. But once that lifts up again, look out. I have a feeling that the sun might be out earlier today than it was here yesterday (which didn't happen until the early afternoon).

I didn't recognize your screenshot but am guessing it was because you had the satellite overlay layer on yours! I did a screenie of the site last night about 7:45 pm just to pinpoint where the activity was at that time based on how my sensor was reacting (and I usually use them to confirm in any case).

I made it up to 88 around 3:15 pm, a couple hours after the sun came out and then self-destructed. It's currently mostly cloudy and 83 with dp 77. Not much on the radar nearby except for some stray cells out west that form and then dissipate.

A couple years ago, I even bought a couple 5-gallon jugs and a siphon to store some over the winter so I didn't have too many 1-gallon jugs hanging around and for those dry periods when the rain faucet (or as CoolHandMike calls it - the "free Skywater") shuts off! I was just looking at the radar and a couple blips have been trying to get started in south-central PA around York & Lancaster County so will see what happens with the atmosphere and rain today (I only got 0.05" yesterday).

LOL I put clean buckets out and will collect rain water and store it in old milk/water jugs. I have a couple sensitive houseplants that hate the fluoride but seem to appreciate the rain water (I had been initially giving those distilled water but that can get burdensome purchasing after awhile). And here it is, now at 1:30 pm, the clouds and mist have lifted, the sun has finally come out, and the dp has soared again. So I guess the sag in the warm front has moved to the north. Currently up to 81 and rising with dp 75.

I'm not sure what site that is from but If you go to similar lightning map sites like "lightningmaps.org" - https://www.lightningmaps.org where they depict a lightning strike on the map with a dot that flashes when a strike is detected and then it generates a graphic of a circle that radiates out from the dot. The dots are often color-coded to depict how long ago the strike was registered, and will eventually disappear off the map. I expect it is more for a dramatic visualization vs anything that is meaningful other than maybe the possible intensity (but I don't know if those sites get that fancy with quantitative measuring vs qualitative registering). I have a lightning sensor from Ambient and on their lightning map, the circle that is generated depicts the estimated radius between the sensor location and the general area where the lightning strike appeared to have originated. The console display actually reports the estimate of how far away and how long ago a strike occurred, although I'm not sure if that distance value is captured in the database... haven't had chance to do a deep dive into that yet. I know it at least counts and saves the number of strikes and I'm still fooling around with weewx to get it to at least correctly graph the number strikes per set time increment. For my sensor, Ambient claims the sensor (WH31L) has a range of about 25 mile (40 km). I think the average furthest I've spotted mine detecting was about 17 - 21 miles (radius) away. Being up in the hills obviously helps. Well if I had known the temp wouldn't have hit 80 here by now, I coulda put the oven on! Currently 74 with dp 72 and overcast/misty. There was some drizzle earlier this morning here, enough to somewhat wet the sidewalk but nothing measurable so far. Attached a snapshot of my sensor detecting a strike around 3:22 pm yesterday as a note...

I annotated your image to show where you are talking about. The wobbly nature of that warm front is going to be the determinant on where stuff sets up. Some places do seem to have wrung much of the moisture out of the air but then if the sun comes out and heats things up, it'll destabilize again. I know the lightning around the metro area was off the charts yesterday. ETA - the fog has picked up a bit around here, probably around 1/4 - 1/2 mile vis.

Heard on KYW that Mt. Holly was estimating it as a 100 year flood. Found the tweet about it - I ended up with 0.05" yesterday. Currently 72 IMBY (will probably be my low) with some stratus, fog, and mist and a dp at 72.

Saw on a KYW breaking news alert that the Vine St. Expressway eastbound through the city is flooded out and closed. Now seeing reports of between 8 - 10+" in that same area. It looks like some of the heaviest stuff has shifted a tiny bit to the south and east and is mostly in NJ, running along the river and adjacent areas of Camden and Gloucester Counties. My temp here is 78 with dp 73, and mostly cloudy with some breaks in the cloud deck to the west.