A surge of very warm air into New England may bring Connecticut our first heat wave of 2018. While a heat wave appears quite likely what remains uncertain is just how hot it will be. A good way to look at this is this box and whisker plot of the European Ensemble forecast for this weekend. The box represents the most likely solution while the whiskers represent more extreme and less likely scenarios.
You can see even the middle 50 percent (25th to 75th percentile) is quite large on Sunday. This is not totally surprising given uncertainty into which direction the wind will be blowing from.
For extreme heat in Connecticut you generally need a westerly wind - this mitigaes the influence of the cooler Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. Today, most of our computer models showed more of an onshore component to the wind Sunday and Monday which would limit the heat and likely preclude record heat.
Of course, there is time for this to change! A change in wind direction would result in temperatures approaching 100F. Stay tuned.
