Awesome October

What a month!  MLB crowns its champion (Are the Giants a dynasty??); NFL reaches its mid-season (Will the Raiders go 0-16??); NCAA gets its "First Final Four" named (Where's the Vegas fav 'Bama?)...and the weather starts to turn to the roils of winter.  In fact, if this pattern continues into the next few months, I anticipate a serious case of sleep deprivation on my part during this upcoming dark season.  I mean, look at the depth of this trough swinging through this weekend!  Negatively tilted with blocking in front fueled by the upper level energy that dove over the top originating from the central Pacific in the form of what once was Hurricane Ana!  Wow!

And the subsequent nor'easter bomb that will slam the east coast this weekend!

For us in the KMDT area, the obvious sensible wx will be the diving cold air first aloft then mixing to the surface by Sunday...look at the temps a mile up with the sub-freezing air diving to "Hot-lanta"!

And giving us what I think will be our first hard freeze of the season under a nudging zone of high pressure Sunday night into Monday am...the Euro doesn't agree with me on this one...I think the modeling is keeping it breezy enough to not allow the cold air to settle...so the challenge is on!

But as you can see, the cold air will quickly vacate and a relatively strong ridge will pop by mid-week with temps pushing back into the 60s by Wednesday...but with the low sun angle at this time of year, it is difficult to remove the stubborn low-level cold.  And with each subsequent cold air mass to intrude, each warm-up becomes more and more difficult; hence, the transition into the winter season!  Here are the 850 temps for mid-week!  That a rather large pool of warmth over the Mid-Atlantic!

Yet another deep trough is progged for next weekend promising even colder air...but that is a different story for a different day!  But looking back at Awesome October, here is how it appeared in terms of temps...generally benign nationwide with normalcy over the lakes...and Florida!

For KMDT, we averaged a temp of 57.1ºF which is 2.7 above the norm...last year we averaged 57.4ºF for October for whatever that is worth.  But to show you how this week might reflect last week, our coldest temp of the month came last Sunday (30ºF) but our warmest max temp came 3 days later (78ºF)!  October was a bit drier than the norm by 0.84"...So what is ahead?  Here is the current prog for November...

Looks like the modeling is hinting at a ridge in the west; a trough in the east with a storm track up the spine of the Appalachians as seen by this progged precip!

So as we head into November and the PIAA football playoff season, cool and damp looks to be the rule.  Congrats to both CD and East on their 8-2 regular season campaigns and we wish them well as they venture into the D3 playoffs next week.  How neat would that be to see these 2 meet again in Hershey a few weeks down the road?  Stranger things have happened...just sayin'...

Enjoy your week's end!

Smitty

AA:  A cold and blustery weekend followed by a brief warm up mid-week.  October was warm and dry...November looks to be cooler and damper...its about 110 days until pitchers and catchers report!