The 614cast
Today’s tl;dr
🌤️ Mostly sunny, high in the middle 80s.
Forecast highlights
🌧️ Rain!
Yes, it’s finally almost here. Rain chances ramp up tonight and stay high tomorrow, then rapidly drop off early tomorrow night when the cold front sweeps through.
As you can see, the bulk of the rain falls during the day tomorrow. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have showers in the area when we get going Tuesday morning and probably still have them around at the end of the school day and perhaps even at the end of the workday.
The atmosphere will be pretty saturated as relatively high moisture levels for this time of year cover the region. The National Blend of Models has very high odds of us getting at least a half-inch of rain — at least an 80% chance.
The official outlook from NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center is for about an inch of rain in the Columbus area. That’ll take some fairly efficient rainfall to get there, but it’s hardly impossible. Better odds of higher amounts are farther south of I-70.
📉 Warm now, but cooler soon
One more warm day greets us, which means we’ll go six-for-six on hitting at least 80 degrees to kick off October.
Considerably cooler air takes over for the rest of the week.
We might very well not get out of the 60s on Wednesday and Thursday. While that seems quite cool, it’ll be just about where we should be this time of year.
If morning lows later this week go as expected, they’ll be the coolest we’ve seen so far this season.
📊 Today’s almanac
Normal low/high: 49 / 70
Record low/high: 30 (1980) / 89 (2007)
Sunrise/set: 7:33 a.m. / 7:05 p.m.
🌕 Harvest Moon
No, not the video game or the Neil Young song.
This month’s full moon is the Harvest Moon, and it’ll be fullest tonight at 11:47 p.m. Extensive cloudcover ahead of tomorrow’s rainmaker should hold off long enough to allow us to see it. If you look closely, you might also see Saturn a bit to the right of the moon.
If you saw the moon last night, it was darn near full and will still be nearly full Wednesday night after clear skies return.
The full moon nearest the fall equinox is the Harvest Moon. Typically, that’s in September, but not this year.
The full moon near the equinox is also unusual compared to other times of year. From EarthSky:
All full moons rise around sunset. And, generally speaking, the moon rises about 50 minutes later each day, as it moves in orbit around Earth. But when a full moon happens close to an autumn equinox, the moon on the following nights rises closer to the time of sunset. For mid-temperate latitudes, the moon rises only about 20 to 25 minutes later daily for several days before and after the full Harvest (or Hunter’s) Moon.
Having a bright moon rising relatively close in time from one night to the next was helpful for letting farmers see a little better while harvesting into the evening.
This full moon is also a supermoon; it will be very near its closest distance in its orbit around Earth. That said, you won’t notice that it looks bigger, since the difference is awfully hard to perceive unless you could compare them next to each other… and suddenly having two neighboring moons would cause some problems. 😉
🌭 For the weather weenies
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Renowned U.S. climate center trims staff ahead of expected budget cuts (Science)
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Wyoming’s football field covered in hail in UNLV game a sight to see (USA Today For The Win)