Onshore east winds bringing moisture off the Atlantic has led to a beautiful, tropical-like sky. The photo is below is one I snapped early Wed....the 2nd is from Paula Horne from sunset. One of the heavy showers Wed. produced a waterspout offshore of Fernandina Beach about noon. Click
here to see the video from Gabriel Arnold.
More of the same for Thu.-Sat. with long parts of each day dry but there will also be widely scattered showers & a few t'storms. Temps. will jump well into the 80s & close to 90 inland.
A wetter & stormier pattern looks to be evolving for late in the weekend into next week. An upper level low pressure area will move along the Gulf Coast & stall near the Central Gulf Coast. The upper level system should help develop a surface low over or near the extreme Northern Gulf. The result will be a fetch of southerly flow -- both at the surface & aloft -- all the way from the Caribbean & Southern Gulf. The entire combination should be good for several days -- at least -- of showers & t'storms with heavy rain from later Sunday through at least Tue./Wed. depending on the exact movement & location of the storm system to the west.
For those that monitor the tropics & the East Atlantic, you might have noticed that cloud cover is cut off or that there is bad data over the far E. Atlantic. The problem began a couple of weeks ago due to the malfunctioning GOES-13 satellite. NASA has now shut down the satellite in an attempt to make repairs via a computer. In the meantime, GOES-15 which normally covers the E. Pacific & Western U.S. has been shifted east to offer more coverage of the Eastern U.S. & Atlantic (see wide satellite image below). Click here to view a number of satellite sectors from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies.
On the east edge of the satellite coverage, you can see "Nadine" now going on 2 weeks since it was "born". Global Hawk - the unmanned plane - flew around "Nadine" Tue.-Wed. Click here for a NASA story on the unmanned plane & its dropsondes.
