Welcome to the 3-H Club

Hazy, Hot, and Humid. Ah, the days when you begin to become more adept at pronouncing words like ick, shew, ughh, whoo, and other 3 to 4-letter words of your choosing. Nevertheless, today will be one of those days. Here's a summary of what to expect:


The map above shows the air quality forecast. Our region around Louisville, Cincinnati, and Evansville show that the air is unhealthy for sensitive groups and generally call for some type of Action on our part in order to help curb some of the pollutants in our air.

Unfortunately, the large ridge of high pressure primarily responsible for trapping these pollutants at the surface is not wanting to budge a whole lot. Therefore, we will have to suffer for a little while longer.

Our 5-day Precip outlook from the HPC is trending toward a little bit wetter around here. Not only will that alleviate some of the pollution issues, but will also bring some (and I can't believe I'm saying this) needed precip, primarily for my recently planted vegetables in the garden. My pepper garden is not a fan of the 90-degree heat.

And finally, on a weather note of a different type, space weather has been very active too. A significant Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME, left the sun's gravitational pull at high velocities and should make a glancing blow at the Earth's magnetic field sometime today or late tonight. Aurora watchers should be nicely rewarded in the higher latitudes.

One more interesting stat, while we're talking about the sun, is the number of days when there are no observable sunspots. So far for the year 2011, we've had only 1 day with no sunspot activity.

What do you think about sunspot activity and its influence on our weather patterns? Much debate has surrounded this issue for quite some time now. Here are a few articles to look at while you're keeping cool today:

http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/1/3/13
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090827141349.htm
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100414/full/news.2010.184.html
http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/jan4/sunspots.htm

MS