Summer warm-ups: Highs in the mid-80s. Rip-current forecasts. Tropical storm brewing?
Temperatures are heading to late-June levels; the weather service is issuing rip-current advisories; and the hurricane center says a tropical storm might be brewing. Yes, summer is coming.
![A typical rip current.](https://www.inquirer.com/resizer/Xsdnmo8a3Q25uBrY8ZV3qilWT2I=/760x507/smart/filters:format(webp)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-pmn.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WS625EIMEVFILJXHF653DVKBC4.webp)
An entire month has passed since the last officially clear day in Philadelphia, a period in which rainfall has been about 150 percent of normal.
Yet the solstice next month is a certainty, and on Friday, three reassuring — if not necessarily positive — signs popped up indicating that summer is in the waiting room, starting with the forecast itself.
The projected highs for Sunday and Monday, in the mid-80s both days, would be “normal” for the third week in June.
And the National Weather Service on Friday issued its first “rip-current” forecast of the season on the same day that the National Hurricane Center said the season’s first tropical storm might be brewing. (Technically, the Atlantic Basin hurricane season doesn’t start until June 1.)
“There’s a lot of summerlike things going on,” Jonathan O’Brien, a meteorologist at the Mount Holly office, said Friday.
The hurricane center advised that a disturbance several hundred miles to the south of Bermuda has a 30 percent shot at developing into a named storm in the next five days.
That development is unrelated to the rip-current forecast that warned of “moderate risk” of dangerous swells along the New Jersey and Delaware coasts during the weekend, said O’Brien.
That advisory is a product of south to southwest winds and a full moon during the weekend.
But should that tropical or subtropical storm develop, it could migrate to an area that would enhance rip-current risk along Jersey Shore beaches, O’Brien said.
Rip currents are funnels of swiftly seaward-moving water, with speeds up to 8 feet per second, that result from the interactions of waves, currents, and surf conditions.
They have been blamed for more than 45 deaths at Jersey and Delaware beaches during the last two decades.
Rip-current risk aside, Atlantic surf temperatures in the mid-50s aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, although the weather might lure some beachgoers.
No totally clear days are in the forecast — Philadelphia hasn’t had a day with less than 30 percent cloud cover, the official criterion for “clear,” since April 16. But Saturday should be rainless, and Sunday’s forecast has a mere outside shot at a shower.
“There’s been a lot of cloudy days and a lot of rainy days,” said O’Brien, “but it looks like we’re turning a corner on that now.”