Saving Private August

Now

Cloudy, a little warmer, humid. Despite the "Partly sunny, High 85" on the front page of your dead-tree WaPo this morning, it's another cloudy and cool, but sticky, afternoon in the Washington metro area. (Wonder how that happened; those lazy drones at the National Weather Service and their freedom-hating lackeys at CapitalWeather.com said "upper 70s". Oh yeah, here it is in small print on the back page of the Metro section: "SOURCES: AccuWeather, Inc. . . ." I would have sworn I read somewhere (scroll down) that socialized meteorology was Bad for America.)

Although the wind still has an easterly component, it's been more out of the south than recently, and some thinning of the low overcast has allowed temperatures to reach the mid and upper 70s by mid afternoon. At 3:00, you'd have had to go as far south as Richmond to see a temperature of 80°. Dewpoints are even more muggy than yesterday, in the sticky upper 60s to 70°. If you opened your windows, you're probably going to need air conditioning to get the humidity down. Radar is showing an impressive area of storms and an associated warning box northeast of Pittsburgh, but it's dry east of the mountains.

As we've been promising and Jason explains in his post below, more August-like temperatures are on the way and should be here for the weekend.

Tonight and Tomorrow

Decreasing clouds, humid, warmer. Without much of an incentive (maybe they should be privatized) to leave town just yet, the clouds will persist tonight, and the high dewpoints should contribute to mist and fog in some places with lows in the upper 60s to near 70°. Although the clouds will last into the morning, indications are good that some sun in the afternoon tomorrow will allow temperatures to finally get back to the mid and upper 80s, perhaps even 90° for a high.

For the outlook through the weekend, scroll on down to Jason's post below.

Tropical Topics

Dean was declared dead, and the last advisory was issued at 11pm last night. No new development is expected in the Atlantic for the next couple of days.

Political Science

Bob King, who covers hurricanes for the Palm Beach Post in his Eye on the Storm blog, does an excellent job of deconstructing the Faux News war on the National Hurricane Center in his post yesterday. He includes a link to some unofficial, but absolutely devastating, data on the issue of AccuWeather vs. Hurricane Center accuracy on Katrina (and Rita, as well). In 5 cases (6 for the feds), the AccuWeather 5-day position error for Katrina was more than double that of the Hurricane Center.