The weekend baseball and soccer rainouts are piling up in the Northeast, including in New York City, where rain is expected to dampen outdoor plans for the seventh consecutive weekend. Only 12 out of 42 weekends have been dry in the Big Apple this year.
“This may shock you, but yet another storm is heading for the northeast United States on a weekend, for the seventh weekend in a row,” John Homenuk, a meteorologist for New York Metro Weather, said in a video update Thursday.
Visitors brave strong winds and driving rain Saturday during storm Lee in Bar Harbor. Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press
Rain is also forecast this weekend in Boston, which has recorded rain on 8 of the past 10 weekends, and in Maine, where rain is expected to wash out much, if not all, of this weekend. Over the past 20 weekends since the beginning of June, only five have been dry, Cindy Fitzgibbon, chief meteorologist for Boston’s ABC affiliate, said on X.
Meteorologists attribute the rain to a repetitive – and unfortunate – cycle bringing in storms every seven days or so – centered around Saturday.
The weekend rain hasn’t been quite as persistent in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. But still, those cities have seen rain on about half of their weekends during the past two months.
The pesky weekend rain and clouds is frustrating people up and down the Interstate 95 corridor and prompted Eric Fisher, chief meteorologist for Boston’s CBS affiliate, to jokingly “offer to work Saturday & Sundays and take off Wednesdays and Thursdays.”
The rain has also made for one of the most underwhelming foliage seasons in memory, as the excessive moisture is dampening the typically fiery fall shades. Would-be leaf-peepers locked inside on these autumn weekends aren’t missing much.
So what’s happening and “do the weather gods just hate us?” Homenuk was asked in an interview published Wednesday on Hell Gate, a New York City news outlet. While there is conflicting research as to whether rain actually occurs more frequently on weekends, and if weekday pollution contributes to weekend rain, Homenuk chalks it up to “bad luck.”
This current stretch of repetitive weekend rain is due to a persistent area of high pressure over Canada, Greenland or the Arctic, according to Homenuk.
“I call it an atmospheric traffic jam. Basically, we have all these disturbances coming from the Pacific, and this block to our north is not letting them go north of us, so they’re kind of directed right at us,” Homenuk said.
The setup is known by meteorologists as a “blocking pattern” and can sometimes lead to storms coming through the same area every six to seven days for weeks at a time. The weekend timing, however, is just a stroke of bad luck, according to Homenuk.
“It very easily could have been that this block set up slightly differently, and the storms were coming through on Wednesday. But instead, it’s happening on Friday and Saturday, which really stinks,” Homenuk said. He also suggested that people might notice rain more on the weekends, when it can have a greater impact on outdoor plans, than on weekdays when people are at work.
“I think there’s just a hypersensitivity to what’s going on, on those two days that we have off,” Homenuk said.
Much of the Northeast has seen abnormally wet weather – and not just on the weekends – since the spring, including multiple extreme rain events that affected New York’s Hudson Valley, Vermont, Massachusetts and – just two weeks ago – New York City.
Many areas have seen at least 10 inches more rain than normal over the past 180 days:
There could be yet more rain in the Northeast next weekend, the last of October. The jury is still out on November, when the National Weather Service forecasts equal chances of near-normal, above-normal and below-normal precipitation. Predicting what days of the week rain might occur that far ahead of time is virtually impossible.
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