A wet start to the weekend will then give way to much warmer weather. We’ll get a break from the rain Sunday and Monday before the next shot for rain. Of note, a possible tornado may have impacted parts of northern Queens last night.

Rest of today – increasing chances for showers and thunderstorms especially in the early afternoon. Otherwise, mostly cloudy with high temperatures in the mid-80s.

Saturday – more widespread showers and thunderstorms in the morning, with some concern for flash flooding. The set up also could produce some isolated severe weather as a weak impulse of energy travels up the upper trough that’s been locked in over the Eastern US this week. Improving conditions later with highs in the mid-80s.

Sunday – the upper trough that’s been causing this week’s wet weather finally exits east. High pressure begins to build south of us, bringing warmer temperatures with highs in the low-90s and lots of sun.

Monday – more of the same as Sunday, sunny, hot and humid with highs in the low-90s.

Possible Tornado in Northern Queens Last Night

At 10:18 last night, residents in northern Queens, the eastern Bronx and northern Nassau received alerts from our local National Weather Service forecast office of a tornado warning. The damage was evident this morning, with many downed trees in College Point. A team from the NWS is assessing the damage to determine whether what hit this area last night was really a tornado, or if it was some other non-tornadic wind phenomena.

I was in a neighborhood that received this warning, but at first, I almost thought it was in error because there were no signs outside of anything awry, no thunder, no rain. However, a quick look at the base radial velocity imagery on the JFK high-definition terminal Doppler radar was revealing – there certainly was a storm with very strong rotation, hence why the warning notes “radar indicated tornado”. In the annotated base radial velocity image below, the white circle indicates a tight mesocyclonic circulation.

Without going too much into technical detail, the greens indicate inbound velocities relative to the radar station (air was flowing towards the radar), while oranges and reds indicate outbound velocities (where air was flowing away from the radar). When forecasters see a “velocity couplet” like this where inbound and outbound velocities are close together, they know this is a signature of strong storm rotation within a mesocyclone. If, within this couplet, you get a “gate to gate” (i.e. adjacent pixels) where the difference between inbound and outbound velocities exceed 90 knots, this is referred to as a “tornado vortex signature”. In this image, if you do the math, you get that the max difference between inbound and outbound velocities was 86 knots, and you an see what appears to be a tornado vortex signature.

We’ll see what the NWS’ assessment says later today, but it appears to me that there was a tornado at some point over northern Queens last night!

UPDATE (1:46PM August 3, 2018): The National Weather Service issued a report confirming that an EF0 tornado touched down in portions of College Point, Queens last night.