Good morning again. As you could see in my previous blog post, it has been a bit stormy, windy, and wet here in New Jersey. Thursday started things off as a coastal storm brought some rain to the area during the day, especially in the afternoon. On Friday, there were some showers around, but it was mainly cloudy, and even foggy in the morning, and at night. Saturday was the big day though. According to the NOAA Almanac for the Month of November that is kept on Greg’s Weather Center, the high temperature reached 70 degrees while the maximum rain for the month so far fell with 0.87 inches.

It was a vigorous storm system that blew through on Saturday. Feeding off quite a vast temperature difference, or gradient, the storm first came up from the south ushering in showers from the Southwest to the Northeast starting in the morning. However, by afternoon there were some breaks in the clouds, and patches of blue sky emerged. Perhaps that occurrence provided a spark or a catalyst to the weather in the form of sunshine to cook up things in the atmosphere. A Tornado Watch was in effect in Southern New Jersey, and at about 4:30 PM EST, the skies began to grow more ominous although night was also starting to set in.

Heavy rains began to fall in the area around Raritan Center at about 6:30 PM EST on Saturday night. It sounded like a torrential downpour characteristic of a summer thunderstorm. On this early Sunday morning though, things have cleared out, but there is still the wind to contend with. According to the National Weather Service, there is a Gale Warning in effect for the coastal waters of Middlesex County as well as the rest of the Jersey Shore. Today’s forecast for Northwest Middlesex County calls for temperatures to only reach a high of 51 while dropping to 42 by about 5:00 PM EST Sunday afternoon.

The coldest weather of the season will be upon us this week as a Continental Polar air mass descends in from Canada following this unusually deep trough. One thing you’ll learn about meteorology is that strong highs tend to follow strong lows, and that is what we are seeing here. The rest of the week shows a couple chances for snow on Monday night into Tuesday (30 percent along with a mixture of rain), and on Thursday. Temperatures on Tuesday are expected to drop to 39 for a high while the low is expected to be 29. On Thursday, temps are anticipated to be around 38 for a high.

For the year, South Plainfield has received 35.78 inches of rainfall including 2.19 so far this month. The most rain observed on a single day so far in 2008 was on September 6th when Tropical Storm Hanna came through. Rainfall amounts topped out at 3.25 inches. So far this month, there have been eight days with at least .01 inches of precipitation, and seven of those days have seen over 0.1 inches. Surprisingly, there were no reports of severe weather in New Jersey yesterday as of the time of this report. As a matter of fact, there was only eight reports total throughout the entire United States, and all of them were confined to the Eastern third of the nation.