Bye-Bye To The Humidity
By Steve MacLaughlin on July 1, 2012, 6:34pm
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I figured I'd round out the week by talking one more time about the dew point and how it has affected the way it has felt across Connecticut this weekend.
Just a refresher...in the summer here in CT, the average range is from about 40° (very dry and comfortable) to 80° (oppressively humid).
Saturday was hot, with highs in the lower 90s, but we had dew points for most of the day in the lower 50s. That meant it felt comfortable, even with the heat. It was actually so dry that our heat index north of I-95 was lower than the actual temperature. It felt cooler than it really was because of the low humidity.
Late in the day on Saturday we began to feel the humidity again...first along the shoreline and then by Sunday morning across the entire state. Although Sunday's high temps were almost identical to Saturday's, the higher humidity made it feel much warmer; made our heat index much higher.
On Sunday afternoon we got the cold front and the storms exploded. We are taking hot and humid air and replacing it with hot but dry air for Monday, and that dividing line fired up the nasty weather.
The image above shows dew points at 6pm when we were seeing severe storms in Southern Connecticut. Check out Hartford's dew point of 70°. That's really high humidity surging up ahead of the cold front.
Now look back to the west...State College and Albany in the lower 50s...Binghamton in the upper 40s. That is incredibly dry air. And with the cold front coming through and a shift to more of a northwesterly wind, we get that air tonight which means the humidity will be plummeting over the next few hours.
With a westerly wind on Monday, it means we should be hot for sure, but no humidity. So it should feel much better than it did on Sunday.
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