Rain chances are back in the forecast for the Pittsburgh area today
Rain chances are back in the forecast today for the Pittsburgh area.
Any Alert Days Ahead? None
Aware: Today will be the shortest day of all time. Really.
For the second day in a row, we could be looking at all the rain happening in Pittsburgh before noon. For places south of the city though, you'll want to keep the umbrella handy throughout the afternoon with mostly rain showers moving through. This is as we have another short wave trough that will kick through, bringing just enough added lift to see rain chances go up. Rain totals won't be that high, with Pittsburgh seeing less than a tenth of an inch and probably less than five hundredths of an inch.
Rain totals will be close to a tenth of an inch and maybe slightly more than that for places south of I-70. The highest chance for rain today will be to the southwest of Pittsburgh. If traveling, there are flood watches posted along the East Coast, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C.
Looking ahead, confidence on the timing of any fronts sliding through is low right now with model data all over the place run to run. Today it looks like our next 'everybody will see rain' day will be on Monday. Yesterday, Saturday looked like the day, and on Monday, it looked like both Friday and Sunday would be the days. At this point, I would say to just take things day to day. Either way, you should keep the umbrella handy as even on calmer days like Thursday, I expect to see isolated storms developing during the afternoon hours.
For the second day in a row, we will also get a little break from the heat. Yesterday, we hit 83 for our daily high. Today we will be similar. I have us hitting 82 today for the high.
Morning temperatures are also in the 60s, so it's a little cooler than it was yesterday.
Today will be the shortest day on record of all time
Just quickly, you may hear somewhere out there today about today being the 'shortest day on record', and it looks like it will be. 'Shortest' is doing a lot of work here though, as we are looking at being around 1.3 - 1.6 milliseconds shorter. We all know a day is equal to one complete spin. This daily spin represents 24 hours, but not all spins are the same. The Earth both slows and speeds up when it comes to our spins. There are a number of things that can both slow and speed up the Earth's rotation, including large weather events. The number one impact on how long a day is happens to be the moon. The closer the moon is to the Earth the faster the rotation and the day. The further away the moon is the slower. This is where I mention there are also some other factors that come into play. This is something that is really cool, though. Today also won't hold the record for long with the 22nd this month and August 5th being longer. For the first time ever, we are going to have a negative leap second added to world clocks in 2029 to catch up on time.
