By Skip Rigney

Over the past 75 years, more hurricanes have occurred in the Atlantic Ocean Basin on September 10th than on any other day of the year. That makes today the climatological peak of hurricane season.

If you’d like to learn more about hurricanes, I will be giving a presentation this Sunday, September 11 at 4:00 PM at the Margaret Reed Crosby Memorial Library in Picayune. The event is sponsored by the Friends of the Library, and the public is invited.

Not only will we discuss hurricanes, hopefully we will be able to celebrate the Saints walloping the Falcons in the opening game of the teams’ NFL season. With kickoff scheduled for noon, the game should be over before 4:00 p.m.

Thankfully, what we will not be discussing at the talk will be any immediate threat of tropical storms or hurricanes for our area during the upcoming week.

Hurricane Earl is churning the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean a thousand miles east of Boston, but there is nothing on the tropical horizon that will affect the Gulf of Mexico for at least a week and probably longer.

One of the topics that I will be discussing at Sunday’s talk is why, despite a consensus among scientists who make seasonal hurricane predictions that 2022 would be a more active-than-average season, the season is actually off to a relatively slow start.

The biggest weather news for the upcoming week for south Mississippi is an approaching cool front. There has been a growing consensus among the computer weather models that the front will make it through Pearl River County, probably on Monday or Monday night.

However, as is often the case in early fall, the question is how far to the south the front will make it, and how much drier air will blow into the area behind the front.

Hopefully we will see humidity levels as measured by the dew point temperature drop into the 50s for the first time since late May. With air that dry there will be more loss of heat at night, and early morning lows could drop into the lower 60s, especially in the northern end of the county.

With fewer clouds and showers behind the front, bright sunshine will still drive high temperatures into the familiar upper 80s to near 90 degrees that we’ve been having.

However, assuming that we get a good dose of drier air on Tuesday and Wednesday, those temperatures won’t feel nearly as sticky as the upper 80s we’ve grown accustomed to.

However, before we get to such a refreshing respite, we’ll continue through this weekend and probably into Monday with warm and muggy air. There will be a chance of scattered, mainly afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms.

Those conditions will continue until the cool front pushes to our south. As a fan of fall, I’ll be rooting for the front to make it across the goal line of the Gulf Coast almost as much as I’ll be rooting for the Saints to hand the Falcons their first loss of 2022.