WEATHER
Like yesterday, a few showers have bubbled up in the heat of the afternoon. Unlike yesterday, they’re politely avoiding Nashville. The few showers out there this evening will fizzle once the sun goes down, and temperatures tonight will drop to the low to mid 70s by early Friday morning:
Hazy, hot and humid weather will continue for the next few days, thanks to a giant dome of high pressure in the atmosphere anchored just to our west:
High pressure means sinking air — the air warms up as the weight of atmosphere above forces it downward. High temperatures will hit the mid to upper 90s Friday and Saturday:
The heat index will top out between 100° and 110° each day as well:
Just a slight chance of an isolated storm on Friday, then maybe a few spotty storms Saturday afternoon.
Sunday will bring us a better chance of storms late in the day, but temperatures will still reach the low 90s before they develop. A few of Sunday’s storms could be strong, but right now we’re not included in any extended outlooks from the Storm Prediction Center. I think the highest they’ll go is a “Marginal Risk” (level 1 of 5):
We finally get a break from the worst of the heat Monday and Tuesday — even then, highs will still reach the upper 80s. Scattered storms will still be hanging out on Monday, but we should gradually dry out by the middle of next week:
One caveat to that “drying out” part — the newest run of the European model suddenly shows a good chance of rain Wednesday and Thursday. That’s a new development, so we’ll wait and see if future data from that model (which is generally the most-accurate) continue to point in that direction. For right now, it’s an outlier.
Tune in to News 4 at 10pm — I’ll be showing more “dogs beating the heat” pictures!
LINKS
- Some great video here: Lightning crawled across the sky like spiders over southern England Tuesday night.
- This is cool. Or, you know, ice cold: “two weeks on ice” in McMurdo Station, Antarctica.
- Antarctica’s trillion-ton iceberg and the ice shelf it left behind are already starting to crack up and change.
- As the data comes in from June, 2017 is the second hottest year on record at the halfway point of the year.
- This is exactly the kind of innovation that needs more encouragement: a new solar cell captures nearly all energy of the solar spectrum.
- Future space colony? Maybe we should look beyond our Moon and Mars, to Saturn’s moon Titan.
- NASA just caught a glimpse of the mysterious object that the New Horizons probe (the one that visited Pluto) will reach in 2019.
- An interesting hypothesis about the kinds of things advanced extraterrestrials might build.
- Modern physics is pretty important to day-to-day life.
- Historical nerdery: The Great Fire of Nero and the ancient history of firefighting.
- Why are dogs so friendly? Researchers have pinpointed genes that may have the answer.
