It’s amazing sometimes to see how Mother Nature works. Yesterday it seems things came unglued with thunderstorms in the morning then widespread, gusty winds in the afternoon with lake effect rain showers. Today it’s like nothing happened. The sun is out and the wind is way down. However, the pattern is rather progressive; things are moving quickly. Don’t get used to the sun.
Already moisture is building over the middle of the country. A cold front dropping south is interacting with low pressure over the southern Plains. The high clouds that are at the leading edge of this moisture plume are already moving into western Pennsylvania as of late Thursday morning. One of the issues we have wrestled with all week was what to do with low pressure. The GFS for much of this week had an interesting scenario with low pressure tracking to the west of central New York which would have caused temperatures to shoot into the 70s. The problem is the rest of our computer models said no way. They were taking low pressure over us or to the south of us. It’s the end of the week and in this game of meteorological model chicken the GFS models has come in line with a farther south and cooler solution. We are keeping Friday’s high closer to upper 50s/60 with occasional showers throughout the day. We are encouraged that this system looks like it will be on the move with showers departing no later than early Saturday morning.
With Columbus Day weekend now fast approaching it appears the fall colors are probably a bit past peak over the Adirondacks. I say probably because my wife and I were up in the Old Forge/Big Moose Lake area last Saturday and they seemed to be just short of peak at that point. Closer to home I was at Green Lakes on Tuesday with my camera at the ready but I was a bit surprised at how far from peak the colors are right now. I remember taking some spectacular pictures at the park this same weekend just last year. It looks like we will have to wait a bit longer this year for the colorful show. I’m not sure why. I thought it might be because we had cooler nights last September and early October but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Click here to check out the latest Foliage Report.
Finally, I was just perusing the latest on El Nino. We get a
nice succinct summary from the National Centers for Enviromental Prediction (an arm of NOAA) e-mailed into the office every month about this time. The El Nino is still ongoing out in the Pacific and will likely strengthen but it is not expected become a strong El Nino (like ’82-’83 or ’97-’98). As I mentioned to several people at the Fair, I think that the El Nino will be central to our winter forecast. I’m starting to dig through the data right now and we will have our Winter Forecast in November.
