The 614cast
Today’s tl;dr
🌤️ Mostly sunny, blustery in the afternoon, high in the middle to upper 50s.
Forecast highlights
🌡️ Seasonable to mild temperatures
For early November, this week is looking pretty darn fair. Highs will be near to above average, probably peaking on Wednesday with highs in the mid-60s.
After a break from the wind this past weekend, this afternoon will be blustery again with winds out of the west at 10–15 mph, gusting past 20. On the flip side, we’ll have quite a bit of sunshine to help counteract that breeze.
Winds back off on Tuesday before turning gusty again on Wednesday.
🌂 Dry until Friday
A couple of disturbances clip across the Great Lakes today and Wednesday, but neither brings us rain. A weather system on Friday, on the other hand, brings a high likelihood of wet weather.
Here’s the forecast map from the main American model, starting today and ending Friday evening:
The European forecast model also paints a very similar picture, lending a good amount of confidence to a wet forecast for Friday. The jury’s still out on when exactly rain arrives, but current guidance suggests most of the action will be in the afternoon and evening.
📊 Today’s almanac
Normal low/high: 39 / 58
Record low/high: 20 (1991) / 80 (1987)
Sunrise/set: 7:03 a.m. / 5:26 p.m.
🕑 What if we actually stayed on one time?
Unpopular opinion: I greatly prefer having both standard and daylight saving time. I know that people say they want to just have one and stick with it… but did you know we already tried it once? Spoiler alert: People changed their minds about it real fast and it got repealed before the two-year experiment was over.
I can see the same thing happening again, and this little comparison should illustrate why.
If we kept standard time year-round… the sun would rise as early as 5:02 a.m. in June. In fact, the latest sunrise the entire month of June would be 5:06 a.m. The sun would rise before 6 a.m. from mid-April until about September 1. Meanwhile, the latest sunset would be just after 8 p.m.
If we kept daylight time year-around… were you already weary of the sun not coming up until almost 8 a.m. last week? Sunrise would be after 8 a.m. from about November 1 through mid-April. It would be dark until at least 8:45 a.m. from mid-December until late January! And sunsets for most of December would still be at 6:15 p.m. or earlier.
Doing only one or the other, in my personal opinion, would pretty much suck. We get reasonably close to the best of both worlds by observing both standard and daylight saving time. I think most people would rather have daylight in the evening rather than the morning during the summer, and not start the day in darkness all winter and even into early spring.
By the way, I’m well aware of the “the time change is bad for our health” argument. But if we did away with the semi-annual switch purely on those grounds, then I guess we should probably ban traveling across time zones, since it’s… you know, the same thing, as far as our body is concerned? And if you fly across multiple time zones, you’re doing more than just the one hour that happens twice per year. 🤷
🌭 For the weather weenies
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Hurricane Melissa maxed out what scientists thought was possible (New York Times)
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More homes fall into ocean along North Carolina’s Outer Banks (ABC News)