Bike Week Weather 2008
 

Bikers have their own preferences when it comes to weather because their mode of transportation exposes them to it. Also many of the bike week events are held outdoors. This year, weather may play a key role in the success of Bike Week, because the economic factors are not-so-favorable. Ideal weather could make all the difference. So this thread is for the discussion of bike week weather 2008.

Starting things off, we have amazing weather for any summertime outdoor activity right now. This weekend the heat and humidity will try to return on Saturday but won't last more than a few hours before the next cold front comes along with more showers and thunderstorms.

After that, I see GFS suggests a return to a 500 mb trough over the northeast - more of the cool, showery weather we had prior to the heat wave that just ended. That wouldn't surprise me at all, because nationwide the weather has been acting as though it's April, in a general sense. There's even more accumulating snow (at the city-level) out west today, more rain for the already-flooded plains... always a severe weather outbreak somewhere every day... all typical of April.

However ECMWF seems to keep a more zonal pattern (straight west-east flow) through the middle of next week, which would result in more of a warm, dry trend around here.

The latter appears more biker-friendly but NOAA/CPC is apparently going with the western ridge/eastern trough as an outlook for the next 14 days as GFS-MRF suggests.

Thoughts anyone?

Cool and unsettled! Not exactly good biking weather, but I'll be happy to not have to turn on the AC for a while.

I just took a peek at the NWS forecast for Laconia region.

It looks to be okay until this Saturday afternoon, then cloudy with a 40 to 50% chance of showers each day and evening. Highs about 70 day, low 50's at night from Saturday afternoon until Wednesday.

Per NWS forecast discussion today, looks like they are currently in agreement with what I said yesterday. GFS-MRF brings us an upper level trough which will provide cool and unsettled weather for most of next week (similar to what we had most of the second half of May and the first few days of this month.) ECMWF gets rid of the trough at midweek which is a more hopeful outlook.

Both are in agreement on trough for the first half of the week. This pattern would be kind of fall-like with a general NW flow out of Canada, "self-defeating sunshine" where each day starts off sunny but the heating of each day builds clouds that produce showers in the afternoon and dissipate after sunset.

That kind of weather produces a lot of contradicting terms in the automatically worded local forecasts from the NWS. If that frustrates you, I added the county forecasts to the "local forecast" page of the weathercenter site. As far as I know, the county forecasts are still worded by humans. The location-specific forecasts are worded by computers. Humans make their forecasts as maps of the whole region and save those maps to the computer system. The computers translate those maps into worded forecasts for each point within the map area.