Nice Fall Day In Full Swing As Eyes Watch Ida

Nothing wrong with today as far as I can tell. Confidence level is high that rain is out of the picture today, not even a spit. The old frontal boundary that initially plagued the area for a few days had shoved well south of the immediate Central Florida area yesterday into the Florida Straits..and is now washing out entirely. In its place high pressure is arcing across the Missouri and Mississippi River Valleys and into the southeast U.S. As the high continues to build across this region the next couple of days this will place us in a N-NE, dry flow. However, the pressure gradient between the high and low pressure well to the south will create somewhat breezy winds, increasing by mid-afternoon and especially along the immediate coastal communities.

I've included above a picture of the sky yesterday as the sun was setting. It was filled with contrails and looked pretty cool. I wonder what's going on around here (maybe at Patrick AFB). We had a sonic boom earlier this morning, so something must be going on around here. Also shown is the atmospheric 'sounding' (depicted in the Skew-T diagram) of the atmosphere as sampled from the Kennedy Space Center. Essentially what it's showing is westerly winds not far over our heads, while the NE winds are trapped in the lowest 8000 ft. Those westerly winds aloft will transport high level (cirrus) debris clouds overhead today, but the low level clouds should be few a far between unlike the past few days. You can see how not to far up the lines separate way apart. This indicates very dry air just over our heads. They start to come together a bit up around 30,000 ft. which would be the level of the cirrus clouds.

As for Hurricane Ida, we have plenty of time to rest on our laurels. In fact, it is highly doubtful we would have need to make preparatory actions for the storm, even if it affects us directly. That is, other than preparing for very wet and unusually breezy conditions. The worst of Ida would probably be realized in the form of an increased threat of low end tornadoes sometime mid-week next week, but that is so far out on the far end of the spectrum that it's purely wishful thinking (the storm lover in me speaking out). For now suffice it to say that any threat of conditions from Ida affecting us are extremely conditional and forecasting the future outcome of what will become of it at this point is strictly hypothetical.