You'd think a vampire who must avoid sunlight lest he reveal himself might become pretty knowledgeable about where the sun can appear in the sky.

But Edward Cullen, the vampire who will sparkle on movie screens when "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" opens today, gets it wrong and invents an impossible sun in his reunion scene with heroine Bella Swan.

Mistakenly thinking Bella is dead, Edward decides to step into the sunlight in a crowded plaza in Volterra, Italy, to force the ruling vampire family to destroy him. He plans to wait until the sun is "directly overhead"—at the very top of the sky.

Edward will be waiting a long time unless his talents include not only those revealed in the previous Twilight movie—mind reading, van lifting, and really fast running—but also continent relocation.

That's because only fairly near the equator, in the latitudes of ...

The combination of moisture from Ida and an intense low pressure center that formed northeast of Ida on a frontal boundary along our coast brought some widespread, persistent rain and gusty winds last week, with impressive rainfall totals across most of the state and peak winds that were high enough to cause some power outages and take down a few trees in spots, with some of these resulting in property damage.

The National Weather Service office in Raleigh has released a couple of handy maps summarizing the rainfall and the wind. I've included those maps here. You can see that in general, much of central NC received between 3 and 5 inches of rain from the storm, while parts of the central and northern coast got as much as 5-9 inches. While there were some very localized flooding issues, the fact that the rains were spread over some time and that much of the region had a significant stretch of below-normal rain leading into the event helped limit flooding troubles. Here in Raleigh,...

After a stretch of weekends with less than ideal weather, we really turned things around with a beauty just behind us, with deep blue skies, a few scattered cirrus clouds, and temperatures that topped out at 66 on Saturday and 76 Sunday, all thanks to a departing high pressure center over the Atlantic that continues to extend back into the state from the east as we start the week today.

The forecast becomes more active, and much more difficult, with the approach of Hurricane Ida and associated moisture from the south, a cold front to our west, and a developing upper level trough also approaching front he west and northwest over the next couple of days.

Ida continues to move north across the Gulf of Mexico, but is already starting to weaken in the face of strengthening wind shear aloft as it closes in on the Gulf Coast, and may barely hold hurricane strength as it makes landfall Tuesday morning (first graphic, showing the NHC forecast path). Once it makes landfall, it will...

We often think of October as a transition month that features a number of outbreaks of crisp, cool autumn air and bright blue skies, and historically, climate records tell us that we average almost 13 days with "fair" skies, defined in the records as having 8/10 or more of the sky free of opaque clouds on average during the day. If this October seemed a little gray to you, though, you weren't mistaken. We ended up with 17 "cloudy" days (8/10 or more of the sky covered by opaque clouds) at the Raleigh-Durham airport, compared to a normal of 11 cloudy days, along with 9 "partly cloudy" days and 5 "fair " days.

One might think that so much cloud cover would yield a goodly amount of rain, but we had several situations during the month involving high pressure to our northeast, and stalled fronts with weak low pressure waves well south and east of us. This commonly results in shallow layers of moisture that produce lots of low clouds, and some...

As with all long-range seasonal forecasts, the recently issued winter outlook from the National Weather Service can only provide a general overview of how the winter season may work out across the United States, with few of the specifics regarding wintry precipitation that we'd all like to know about. Unfortunately, while the science of climate forecasting does allow for some skill with climatological outlooks, it does not allow for meaningful day to day or week to week forecasts, or assessments of likely snow and ice amounts, as there are simply too many short-term influences involved that can not be foreseen more than a few days to a couple of weeks in advance.

Nonetheless, by following trends in recent years and decades, and using the ability to predict with some success the evolution of the El Nino Southern Oscillation system, which is one of the principal influences leading to this year's temperature and precipitation outlooks. For North Carolina, the general idea is for precipitation...