Hello everyone!

A cold front will approach our region from the west today, and lose much of its forward momentum as it does so. This means that our weather will primarily be characterized by cloudy skies, some drizzle and fog (especially closer to the coastline), and rounds of showers/thunderstorms.

The first round of showers and storms (appearing in blue on the forecast map above) will arrive in western NH later this morning. These storms have produced some marginally severe wind gusts in the Catskills this morning, but as they move away from the best fuel source (in red/pink on the map above), they are expected to weaken. By the time they arrive in our area, we’ll be lucky to get a rumble of thunder from these showers.

The second round of showers and storms will form along the actual cold front in the early/mid afternoon hours. These storms will have access to a bit more fuel especially over NH. Note that the fuel supply diminishes greatly over Maine due to relatively cool temps and leftover drizzle/fog. As a result, expect a few stronger storms in NH this afternoon that may produce some stray wind damage but overall, today’s severe weather environment appears fairly tame.

High temps today will range from around 60-65 along the peninsulas near Penobscot Bay to 80-85 in southern NH where a brief sunny break can’t be entirely ruled out.

One last note for those reading from the Fryeburg/Bridgton/Norway/Farmington corridor. Radar imagery shows a stray shower wandering in your direction this morning. It contains no lightning (at least as of 6:35 AM) and will pass more or less unnoticed unless you happen to be outside as it moves overhead. Most everyone else should be dry until at least 10-11 AM when that first round of storms arrives from the west.

Here’s an animation of today’s forecast radar (blue) and thunderstorm fuel (red/pink) for those interested. As a brief side note, these graphics are the culmination of a bit of experimentation I’ve been doing in an attempt to learn more about computers and computer programming. I built myself a computer from scratch last weekend and have since been working to configure it to produce graphics like this that I can use for forecasting. There’s still plenty of touch-up work to be done, but overall I think they turned out fairly well!

Drier weather returns tomorrow.

-Jack