Good evening everybody, I wanted to give a heads up on the potential for strong southerly winds developing late Thursday night into Friday morning, as trends indicate temps will be rising through the night and cresting 50º for folks at elevation and in southern CMass and northeast CT.

A strong high pressure system will be setting up to the southeast of New England. In tandem with a strong cold front pushing east out of NY and PA by Friday morning, those two features will help siphon milder, moist air from the Bahamas up the eastern seaboard and push it into the greater WMass region.

We’ll be seeing milder air already moving into the region on Thursday with highs in the 40s expected, but as we cool the first part of Thursday night it will be harder to push mild air into the Pioneer Valley in WMass, as milder flow aloft will more easily create a temperature inversion there (milder temps aloft compared to the surface), which makes it harder to mix wind from up high down onto the surface where we live.

However, it will be easier to get temps to rise the further south and east you go, as well as at elevation, so we’ll have to watch north-central and north-east CT as well as southern CMass back into eastern Hampden County for stronger gusts up to 50mph or so, which could produce isolated outages late Thursday into Friday morning as heavier rains move into the region.

Have a great night and I will update again regarding this potential wind event.