New Jersey’s drought officially is history, and so is the Atlantic hurricane season
Coming soon to the Philly region: True October weather.
Go ahead New Jersey, drink up and wash the cars: After 300 days, the governor’s office on Thursday officially lifted the statewide drought warning.
The decree comes after three months that have featured an assortment of downpours and general rainfalls, with a bonus early-season nor’easter, throughout the Garden State and the Philadelphia region that may have had a lot of folks wondering when too much would be enough.
The region has another shot at rain during the weekend, but the atmosphere may be poised to flip into a radically different, season-changing, rain-repelling pattern.
In fact, said Richard Bann, a meteorologist with the federal Weather Prediction Center, “If this were January, people would worry about how cold it would be.”
Any rain this weekend would be the result of a stalled front and “a surge of tropical moisture from the Gulf,” distantly related to the remnants of Hurricane Polo, said Matt Benz, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc.
Polo, of course, originated in the Pacific, which has been on fire with tropical activity — the mirror opposite of the Atlantic,
The Atlantic Basin, which includes the Gulf and the Caribbean, hasn’t spawned a single hurricane this season, and this has a shot at becoming the first season without a verified hurricane in 132 years.
One extraordinary feature of the Philly’s region’s remarkable turn in rain fortunes, has been the absolute absence of tropical-storm related rainfall, which often has been an important source of late summer and early fall rainfall around here.
The weekend outlook for the Philadelphia region
On the subject of turnabouts, that was the sun that reappeared in the skies over Philly after a September in which it seemed as though the region was living under a dropped ceiling. For the month, Philly officially had three clear days.
The average is about eight during the one of the sunnier and drier month of the year.
» READ MORE: One of the gloomier Septembers on record in Philly has come to a merciful end
The sun is due for encore during a summery Friday, with highs expected in the mid-80s, but as an autumnal front approaches, showers are possible at night.
Saturday should be fabulous day for hay-riders and corn-maze enthusiasts with sun and highs expected to be more October-like, perhaps 15 degrees cooler than Friday’s.
A storm is expected to form along the front as it stalls and move toward the region, perhaps transporting some of Polo’s leftovers, and showers again are possible Sunday and Sunday night.
But October weather really arrives with the workweek, said Benz.
Next week is looking sunny and dry with daytime highs might not get much past 60 degrees Tuesday and Wednesday, and fall into the 40s both mornings. If the foliage experts are right, those sunny days and cool nights should be ideal for the leaf-color.
A fond farewell to the drought
At least the trees won’t be moisture starved.
It may be hard to remember that on July 1, Philadelphia officially had experienced 16 consecutive months of below-normal precipitation.
Antecedent dryness was one thing that moved New Jersey to declare a drought “warning,” asking residents to conserve water voluntarily, on Dec. 5.
On June 1, Philadelphia, its seven neighboring counties, and all of New Jersey were in states of at least “moderate drought,” according to the inter-agency U.S. Drought Monitor.
However, during June the celestial faucets were turned on again, and the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly ended up issuing a record number of flood warnings.
» READ MORE: The Philly region has been a national hot spot this year — for flood warnings
Through Wednesday, rain totals in all the counties of New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania were well above normal during the previous 90 days, according to the Middle Atlantic River Forecast Center.
