Hello all! I am sitting at a BYU cafeteria in Provo, UT right now attempting to update all of you on the incoming heatwave with a battery life at 16% ;). As is often the case with dramatic weather events around here, many details can be confused or inflated to come across as either more or less critical than the actual event really is. In other words, this time around, yeah it’s going to get hot, but it’s not anything we haven’t seen already.
In fact, temperatures will closely resemble our last 90+ degree streak earlier this month, when highs reached the upper 90s! 97 degrees was recorded at Bremerton National Airport on Sunday, August 5th and that’s the closest we’ve been to 100 degrees since July 2009. And there’s no evidence that the temperature recorded was a fluke. In fact, studying the hour by hour numbers on the 5th of August, it seems perfectly reasonable that 97 degrees was in fact reached.
The National Weather Service has also issued an Excessive Heat Watch as a result of the incoming heat, and it reads as such:
…EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING IN EFFECT FROM
NOON THURSDAY TO 11 PM
PDT
FRIDAY…
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN SEATTLE HAS ISSUED
AN EXCESSIVE
HEAT WARNING…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM NOON THURSDAY TO
11 PM PDT
FRIDAY. THE EXCESSIVE HEAT WATCH IS NO LONGER IN
EFFECT.
* TIMING…THE INTERIOR OF WESTERN WASHINGTON WILL
HAVE HIGH
TEMPERATURES WELL INTO THE 90S BOTH THURSDAY AND
FRIDAY
AFTERNOONS.
* TEMPERATURE…HIGH TEMPERATURES ARE FORECAST TO
REACH THE LOW TO
MID 90S BOTH DAYS IN THE SEATTLE AREA…WITH MID
TO UPPER 90S
POSSIBLE IN SOUTHERN AREAS. NIGHTTIME LOW
TEMPERATURES WILL BE
MAINLY IN THE 60S.
* IMPACTS…THURSDAY AND FRIDAY ARE LIKELY TO BE AMONG
THE
HOTTEST DAYS OF THE YEAR
Temperatures undoubtedly will be hot, but likely not much warmer than what we experienced earlier this month. Increased humidity, however, could make it feel hotter than it actually is. Records could also be broken once again, but we’ll take a more in depth look at that tomorrow.
Everything else is still expected to make an appearance: thunderstorms later Saturday into Sunday, a moderate cool down and getting back to seasonal norms next week.
I’ll do a more thorough post on what records could fall, how dramatic the cool down will be and what the long range forecast looks like 8-14 days from now. Trust me, you’re gonna like it! 😉
Have a fantastic evening, all!
Matthew Leach
Forecasting Kitsap
Quick Matt find a plug. Thanks for pointing to Sistek’s site. Very informative
Welcome home 🙂
Matt: Thanks for making quick sense out of all the heat hype. Appreciate ya.