Enticing Emily

Before I get to the main topic of today's post, what a wonderful summer day we enjoyed weather-wise here in central PA!  The morning dawned a bit damp and the air still quite humid, but by early afternoon, the northerly winds mixed out the low level humidity and lo and behold, a glorious summer day ensued.  The satellite pic shows the cloud free skies in our region.  You can also see clearly the front that passed through our area yesterday some thunderstorms that are developing in the humid air masses to our NW and to our SW.

 

Our Sunday looks to be a repeat of today with some cumulus popping up as the upper air will be slightly cooler than today.  As a result, condensation will be occurring at about 5-8K feet and some nice afternoon cumulus will develop during the max heating of the day under the strong July sun.  The dewpoints will be relatively low and there is virtually a zero chance of rain tomorrow as seen by the graphics below.

Here is the probability of any precip country wide.  I believe the area just to the SE of DC is due to the hot air emanating from the Capitol.  Thus, downwind, convection is likely and storms could pop due to the abundance of BS in our nation's capital.

The main focus of this post however is to give a "heads-up" for those of you who watch hurricanes and our tropical islands and the east coast of the USA.  I believe that by tomorrow at this time, tropical storm Emily will have a name.  It appears at this time that Emily will slowly grind herself WNW through the leewards towards Puerto Rico and impact the commonwealth of PR in the Wednesday time frame.  This could be a major hurricane, although the modeling is not going to that intensity as of this posting.  Below are both the IR and the WV satellite images of the storm gathering her wits.

The WV image shows what will need to be overcome and that is the dry (black) air that is advecting SW ahead of the storm.  This may hamper the strengthening process but the environment is conducive to hurricane strengthening over the next several days.  So I am putting out my own Hurricane Watch for Puerto Rico for on/about Wednesday.

As you can see, there is a wide spread amongst the models that sniff these things out.  But, there is a trough that is diving off the east coast of the USA which should keep this storm moving in a WNW direction and not curve to the N and the NE before it impacts the Bahama-mamas by Friday/Saturday.

And the forecast intensity of Emily:

Please understand, this is very, very, very preliminary as tropical weather marches to its own drummer.

In closing, I liked the Phillies trade deadline acquisition of Hunter Pence.  This kid is a baseball player; cut from the cloth of a Chase Utley, or a "Shoeless" Joe Jackson.  He just likes and wants to play baseball.  The Philly phaithful will quickly begin to love this guy.  He comes to play everyday and plays the game it was meant to be played.  He's relatively young as well and his offensive numbers playing on a bad team were good (OPS 0.800)!  Defensively, he is quite the upgrade over anyone else the Phils might put out in right field other than John Jr.  So, once again Rueben, well done!  I read a comment that made me laugh.....the pencil neck Ed Wade has put together a better team in Philadelphia now that he is in Houston as compared to when he was the GM in Philly!  Imagine that!

As for any Pirate fans reading this, I truly feel your pain for the criminal act that Jerry Meals purported this past week in that 19 inning marathon.  What a horrible way to end any game in MLB!  That may have been the absolute worst call that I have seen in ALL OF SPORTS EVER!

Enjoy your gorgeous Sunday whether you're at the Bank, or Yankee Stadium, or just slumin' it with the mere mortals here in central PA!

Smitty

AA:  Beautiful weather Sunday, but watching the tropics and a potential hurricane for later this week to potentially affect Puerto Rico and the Bahamas and maybe the east coast of the USA next weekend.