By the title you may think that I’ve gone crazy, and am talking about a large slimy Mollusk.  However, we often refer to a large thick area of moisture as a slug of moisture.  So that’s what I’m referring to.  There was a large slug of moisture near the coast this morning. There was also a weak area of low pressure along a stationary front.  These features brought some heavy showers and storms to parts of the region this morning.  Especially over the southern Outer Banks and the Eastern Shore:

Super Doppler 10 This Morning

My weather watcher, Doris in Machipongo VA, had 1″ of rain in a 45 minute period.  By about 7:30am the rain was tapering off.  As we go into the afternoon the slug of thicker moisture and the low should push away from Hampton Roads and slowly head northeast.

Today’s Forecast.

So the latest thinking is that showers and storms will be more isolated behind the system as subsidence (subtle sinking air) and slight drying occur behind it.  Highs today will be in the mid-upper 80s with a few 90s inland.  It will feel pretty good when the light breeze blows out of the northeast at 5-10mph (8-12mph near the shore).  The humidity is still fairly high at the surface, but at least the temperatures aren’t too crazy like last week.  There is some intense heat though in the central U.S. today with highs in some of the plains states reaching almost up to 110 degrees.

Tomorrow another round of moisture will come up from North Carolina along the stalled out front.  The front will sit over the Outer Banks, but the moisture will pull into the whole region.  So we’ll  see scattered (40%) showers and storms from the midday through the early evening. After that it looks like this stationary front, low, and deep moisture will finally get knocked out.  So we are looking at only an isolated shower or storm in the afternoon from Thursday into the weekend.  I’m not totally removing the rain chances as the models have flip-flopped a lot this Summer.  But it is reassuring to see that the trend has been drier.  Even some of the folks from the Peninsula northward have caught up on rain recently, so I don’t think there will be too many complaints if we see a couple of days with no rain.

There is one cluster of thunderstorms in the central Atlantic that we are watching.  At this time there is a 20% chance for development.  For now it is just something to watch.  I’ll talk more about it in tomorrow’s blog.

Meteorologist: Jeremy Wheeler