Hello everyone!

Today will feature another day of mostly sunny skies and mild temps, though with winds shifting around to the south, we’ll tack on a few degrees to our high temps today over yesterday. Dew points will also start to creep upwards especially this evening. Expect highs to range from the mid/upper 70s in the far north and right along the Midcoast to low 90s in southern NH. Skies will be mostly sunny today after some very patchy fog burns off in the next couple hours.

Just like the past couple days, afternoon cumulus will pop up in response to daytime heating. At the moment, there’s no indication that more than one or two of these will be able to produce a couple raindrops. As always, the best chance for a very brief shower is up in the mountains.

As I’ve been mentioning for a few days now, Hurricane Isaias remains worth watching closely as it moves through the Bahamas. Thankfully for the entire East Coast, the storm has continued to struggle over the last 24 hours due to some dry air and strong winds about 25,000 feet above the ocean south of Florida. This means that as the storm recurves up the coast, it will do so as a strong tropical storm rather than a strong hurricane. What’s the upshot for us here in Maine? If current forecasts hold, Isaias has a good shot at smashing the last of our drought. The setup here favors persistent rounds of heavy rain starting Tuesday morning and ending midday Wednesday (roughly). When all is said and done, we could be looking at a widespread 3-6″ rain event with locally higher totals possible. If your location is susceptible to flooding, you should start thinking about what you’d need to do to prepare for high water. If you’re high and dry, this storm is likely to feel like just another rainstorm.

If you want to dig deeper into the forecast for Isaias, I suggest reading over my recent blog posts for weather.us. Yesterday morning’s covered some of the meteorological nuances of the storm’s forecast while yesterday evening’s discussed the expected impacts in more detail. If you have friends and/or family down in Florida or North Carolina, make sure they’re up-to-date on the latest forecast info as impacts down there from wind and storm surge will be much more significant than they are up here.

-Jack