The 614cast
Today’s tl;dr
🌤️ Mostly sunny, high close to 90.
Forecast highlights
😎 Staying warm this week
We’ve been warm the past several days, and that won’t change for a while. Highs peak in the neighborhood of 90 the next couple of afternoons.
A cold front (if you can really call it much of one) knocks temperatures back a little for the latter half of the week, but we’ll remain warmer than average.
These are still within about five degrees of our normal high. While it’s toasty, it’s seasonably so. And with dew points generally staying below the 70-degree mark, we’ll be humid but not extreme. I think Wednesday will probably be the muggiest day as moisture pools ahead of the aforementioned cold front.
🌧️ Rain chance is highest midweek
“Highest” is doing a lot of work in that headline, since I’m not holding my breath too much yet. I’m giving Wednesday a 50/50 chance of rain for now, and we could get something as early as late Tuesday as the cold front approaches.
Whatever does develop is shaping up to be disorganized downpours. The afternoon and evening appear to be favored mostly because of the daytime heating.
📊 Today’s almanac
Normal low/high: 65 / 85
Record low/high: 48 (1967) / 96 (1944)
Sunrise/set: 6:40 a.m. / 8:33 p.m.
🌠 Peaking Perseids
As I mentioned in a previous entry, this year’s Perseid meteor shower won’t be as noteworthy as it would otherwise be, for one big reason:
Yeah, the moon that was full over the weekend is still going to be quite bright during the Perseids’ peak the next couple of nights. A bummer, since this is one of those meteor showers that is relatively popular because these meteors tend to briefly leave long “trains” of light in their wake, plus you can be out for a while during the night without getting cold.
Rural locations can see 50+ meteors per hour without strong moonlight, but that number will be greatly reduced this year. The American Meteor Society expects activity will be at least 75% lower than the dark-sky rates… so let’s say roughly 10 per hour, if you can get away from light pollution.
Still want to give it a go? Here’s what to do.
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Head out before dawn, since that’s when the radiant (where the meteors appear to come from) is highest in the sky and when the frequency should be greatest.
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Get away from city lights and face away from them.
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Let your eyes adjust to the darkness for at least 15 minutes. Don’t look at your phone; if you do, you’ll “reset” your vision.
The Perseids are named because the meteors look like they come from near the constellation Perseus. In reality, Earth’s orbit is moving through the leftover trail of dust from Comet Swift-Tuttle. Individual pieces of debris, which are only about the size of Grape-Nuts cereal, burn up about 60 miles above the Earth.
By the way, if you’re out before sunrise regardless of whether you’re spying meteors, look to the eastern horizon and you’ll see Venus and Jupiter appear close to one another.
🌭 For the weather weenies
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Ingredients of a weather forecast (Barb Boustead/Wilder Weather)
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Brief history of a tornado-warned ghost town (Kyle Clark/Bluesky)