Good Morning...while a watch a few more sprigs of new grass germinate this AM...and while I wait to head out and help MC another golf tournament for the benefit of the Marine Corps...I thought I'd put together a quickie weather blog for you...although in all honesty, our weather is once again going to be marked by few, if any, significant rains for potentially the rest of the month as I'm not liking the direction we're going kick off the fall season which by the way gets underway later than ever this year...Friday the 23rd @ 4:05 AM...

Before I get into the weather...my twitter feed last night had this amazing video of the Tsunami in Japan back in mid March on it. I guess the video just came out...so put yourself in the car driving to wherever...as the tsunami is approaching then hitting...your essentially trapped, and there's a video camera running for the whole time. Make sure you look towards the upper left circled area and see what's going on...amazing stuff to be sure! Here it is...

The rainfall yesterday was nice, not overwhelming, but nice. For the most part...it seems that it was a few tenths of an inch or so. A couple of areas got closer to .5+ but those seemed few and far between. If you ad up the last few days though...amounts were in the .33"-1.0" range for many areas. As mentioned though I'm increasingly concerned that another prolonged dry stretch is beginning. Late summer and early fall is often the best weather time of the year here I believe, typically the days are mild an the nights are cool. Rainfall can be tough to come by because typically the gulf moisture is cutoff or lacking because of the progress of various cold fronts moving through the US...also systems typically start to speed up, in a reflection of faster jetstream winds aloft, this faster movement also doesn't allow enough time for return flow to establish itself, allowing gulf moisture to move back towards the north. This should be in play tomorrow as another decent cold front rapidly moves into the area from the NW. This cold front should move through between 3-6PM tomorrow afternoon, ahead of the front highs should be in the 80-85 range, behind the front on Wednesday...closer to 70-75 or so. Behind it a large sprawling area of cooler High Pressure will build in and dry things out and allow some great weather to set up...not as dreary or drab as the last shot of chillier weather last week. more typical for this time of the year. Highs will return to average or so towards the weekend.

The longer range GFS and the EURO through 10 days suggest minimal rainfall, perhaps a few light showers here or there, but nothing really substantial for the rest of the month and looking at the upper level maps through the end of the month leaves one wondering how it will rain again in the foreseeable future and a persistent NW flow, if not NNW flow establishes itself...with repeated cold fronts and brief warm ups heading this way for the next 5-10+ days. The bottom line is that, like I mentioned yesterday, get ready to do a lot of watering for quite some time.

I continue to monitor the weather across the country and the incredible amount of high end weather disasters that have occurred this year.  I believe I saw over the weekend that the recent flooding in NJ is their worst weather disaster on record per the emergency managers there. Check out this map showing the number of weather related disasters since 1980...fascinating that TN is so highly ranked...

Finally did you ever wonder what it would be like to be on the ISS, flying above the earth with a perfect view of the planet...it looks pretty cool. Check out this neat timelapse from NASA showing what it's like.

Joe