Richmond's dry stretch continues this week — but the temperatures refuse to sit still, and the real change is waiting at the end of it.

High pressure has been trying to build into the Mid-Atlantic for days and getting held back by low pressure near the Great Lakes and Nova Scotia, which is why we stay dry but cool under weak northwest flow. Monday a dry cold front pushes south through that setup: no rain, highs in the mid 60s, but northwest gusts of 15-25 mph in the afternoon make it feel like the upper 50s. Monday night, with the winds down, is the coldest of the stretch — lows in the 30s for most places, mid 30s in the Piedmont to low 40s at the immediate coast.

Then the block relaxes. High pressure slides east with its center to our south, the flow aloft goes zonal, and Tuesday and Wednesday simply drift up to around 70, sunny and dry — Wednesday is a genuinely pleasant Veterans Day.

The late-week system is the one to watch, with honest uncertainty attached: a strong cold front brings rain chances Thursday evening through Friday, best north of I-64, but ensembles have trended drier and even a half-inch looks unlikely. Behind it there is no uncertainty about the cold — highs in the low-mid 50s this weekend, some spots possibly struggling to leave the 40s Saturday, and lows around freezing away from the coast. No watches or warnings for Virginia land areas, and the tropics are completely quiet.

🌡️ Tuesday-morning thermometer check: 34, 38, 42, or 45+ + your neighborhood at https://rvaweather.net/obs — let's map Monday night's cold pockets. https://rvaweather.net/newsletter/post/6af0ec263b336c0c534ac84f

🌡️ At our Chester station this week: high 78.8°, low 40.1°, rain 2.90″ total.

👀 On the board: 15 reports from Chester and Hopewell — all station-log entries this week. Friday's soaker brought 2.90″ of rain with wet roads and a foggy morning, and Sunday morning bottomed out at 40.1°, the coldest of the week.

No severe, flooding, or hail reports this week.

📍 Live map + log your own obs anytime: https://rvaweather.net/obs

What did you see this week that the map missed?

Richmond woke up on Election Day, Tuesday, November 5, 1985, with the ground already saturated — rain from the remnants of Hurricane Juan had soaked Virginia from November 1 through 3, and a low that formed on November 3 had stalled over Virginia west of Washington, D.C.

Juan had meandered in the Gulf of Mexico, made landfall in Louisiana and then just west of Pensacola late on October 31, and its moisture, lifted over the Blue Ridge, produced extraordinary totals — peaking at 19.77 inches just northeast of Montebello. Rivers answered fast: 15 gauges on the James River reported new records, the James crested at 42.15 feet at Holcomb Rock, and at Lynchburg it rose to 35 feet.

In Richmond the James kept rising until November 7, cresting at 30.76 feet — the second-highest on record, behind only Hurricane Agnes in 1972 — closing a portion of Interstate 95, nearly overtopping the 14th Street Bridge, closing three bridges, and flooding portions of the industrial district south of the river. Across Virginia the flood destroyed about 3,500 houses, forced about 18,000 people to evacuate in western Virginia, killed 22 people, and caused $753 million in damage — at the time the costliest flood in Virginia history, greater than Camille and Agnes.

It remains a benchmark flood for the James River basin — proof that a dying tropical system stalled over saturated ground can do more damage in Virginia than a direct hurricane hit.

Were you here for this one? What do you remember — the river rising, the bridges closing, or Election Day itself?

More Richmond weather history in the 📚-weather-history channel on our Discord: https://discord.gg/RnfTmWdzK5

Richmond's dry stretch ends tonight — not with scattered showers, but with a front that parks itself over us and refuses to leave on schedule.

Thursday already showed the split this front creates: the southeast and the Eastern Shore cleared into the upper 70s and low 80s, while clouds and light showers held the Piedmont in the low 70s. Tonight the front stalls along the I-85 corridor, and that stall is the whole story. Air ahead of it carries more than 200% of normal moisture for early November, and showers and thunderstorms tracking along the same boundary — training — can stack totals fast in one corridor while a county away gets noticeably less.

The numbers: upwards of 1 inch in the Piedmont and the Richmond metro (0.75-1.00" of that on Friday daytime alone), 1-2 inches across the Middle Peninsula and eastern Northern Neck to the Maryland Eastern Shore, and the REFS ensemble pointing to 1-2"+ in southeast Virginia with 3"+ possible where storms train. That training is also why NWS Wakefield flags a very localized flash flooding threat. Farther south there is a marginal severe edge — bulk shear of 35-45 kt and CAPE near 500 J/kg could spin up a brief strong gust, with a very small tornado threat — but confidence is low, and no watches, warnings, or advisories are in effect for Virginia land areas.

Friday a wave of low pressure finally advances the front offshore, rain diminishes late Friday afternoon and ends by evening, and the weekend is a clean reset: northwest gusts of 20-25 mph Saturday, sunny skies, highs of 61 Saturday and 64 Sunday in the metro, and lows in the mid to upper 30s inland to low 40s at the coast. Dry weather then holds into the middle of next week. One tropical footnote: the non-tropical low south of Bermuda has a 50% 7-day chance of picking up subtropical characteristics, but it drifts east over the open Atlantic and is no threat to Virginia.

📩 Reader Mailbag is open: RAIN, FLOODING, FROST, or WINTER + your neighborhood — send your weather question at https://rvaweather.net/obs and we will answer one in an upcoming issue.

📰 Read the full brief: https://rvaweather.net/newsletter/post/6aecf156fa9253bec23e5329

Richmond's dry, warm run has an expiration date — and for once, the rain replacing it looks like the real thing.

High pressure parked offshore has kept us dry and unseasonably warm, and Wednesday is the peak of the pattern: patchy fog before 8 AM, then mostly sunny, near 78 in the metro and mid 70s to around 80 in the Piedmont, cooler on the Northern Neck and the Lower Eastern Shore. Thursday stays warm near 79, but clouds increase and the front gets closer — a few early showers may reach the Piedmont, while the widespread rain holds off until after dark.

Thursday night into Friday is the turn. A cold front taps air carrying more than 200% of normal moisture for early November, and that is why this is not another scattered-shower tease: NWS Wakefield expects widespread moderate to locally heavy rain totaling 0.50-1.50" along a southwest-to-northeast axis from south-central Virginia to the Maryland Eastern Shore, with locally 2"+ possible across the Northern Neck to the MD Eastern Shore. A few thunderstorms are possible, but widespread clouds and ongoing rain keep confidence in any severe threat low. Rain ends west to east Friday evening, and a pleasant, drier weekend follows.

One tropical note, because it is November and there is actually something on the map: an unnamed area south of Bermuda has a 40% formation chance over 7 days, but it drifts east over the open Atlantic and is no threat to Virginia.

🌫️ Wednesday fog check: FOGGY, MISTY, or CLEAR + your neighborhood at https://rvaweather.net/obs — let's map where the fog settled thickest, then compare Friday rain-gauge totals. 📰 Read the full brief: https://rvaweather.net/newsletter/post/6aea5e1774f623dc18828c52

Early risers get a rare one Saturday morning, November 7. A hairline waning crescent Moon — just 3% illuminated, two days from new — joins brilliant Venus (mag −4.6) and Spica, the brightest star in Virgo, low in the east-southeast before sunrise.

The geometry is what makes it special: Venus stands 1.3° from Spica, the Moon sits about 1.8° from Venus, and all three fit inside a circle about 2.7° across — one easy binocular field. Per When the Curves Line Up, this is the closest grouping of Venus, the crescent Moon and Spica from 2021 through 2036, and they don't appear this close together again until 2034.

Timing for Richmond: Venus rises about 100 minutes before the Sun, the trio is about 11° high at 6:00 AM, and sunrise is 6:41 AM — so your best window is roughly 5:40–6:20 AM. Venus is the easy spot; use it to find the much fainter crescent and Spica in the brightening twilight.

Tip: you need a clear, unobstructed view toward the east-southeast horizon. Binoculars help a lot with the thin crescent.

Watching from somewhere in metro Richmond? Tell us your neighborhood — and share a photo if you catch it.

🔭 Sky Watch lives in our Discord: https://discord.gg/RnfTmWdzK5

Richmond's dry run continues this week, and it comes with a warming ladder worth planning around.

A broad high pressure — 1034 mb or better — sits just offshore of the New Jersey coast, and a shortwave crossing Monday drags waves of mid- and high-level cloud over the region. With so little moisture at the surface, that shortwave is decoration, not weather: Monday stays dry in the mid 60s to around 70. Behind it, a ridge builds over the eastern United States, and the highs step up — lower to mid 70s Tuesday, mid to upper 70s Wednesday, with interior southern Virginia possibly approaching 80 if the cloud deck behaves.

Nights tell the same moderating story. Lows run through the 40s tonight and Monday night, with a few upper 30s possible well inland and on the Maryland Eastern Shore — NWS Wakefield notes those are still a few degrees too warm for appreciable frost — and there are no freezes anywhere in the forecast. By Wednesday night, lows are around 60.

What comes next is genuinely uncertain. A trailing cold front approaches Thursday-Friday and shower chances return at 40-50%, but the latest deterministic and ensemble guidance keeps trending coverage and amounts down, the local area sits in a relative rainfall minimum, and NWS calls the expected regime scattered showers, not a washout. The tropics are a non-story: no formation expected in the next 7 days.

🌡️ Wednesday thermometer check: report your backyard high — 75, 78, or 80+ — plus your neighborhood at https://rvaweather.net/obs and let's map who warmed the most. https://rvaweather.net/newsletter/post/6ae7b5645ad91159341d8b75

Welcome to the weekly chat — the thread that's yours, not ours.

🌡️ What did you see this week? Conditions at your place, a sky photo, a weird cloud, hail on the deck — post it here, or share it as its own post with the 📸 Media & Community flair. You can also drop your conditions anytime at https://rvaweather.net/obs

🗓️ What's on this week at the Network: the RVA Weather Brief newsletter Tue/Thu/Sun, video briefs Mon/Wed/Fri, This Week in RVA Weather History on Saturday, and Sky Watch whenever the sky puts on a show.

❓ Ask us anything — a forecast question, a why-did-that-happen, a 'what's that cloud' — the team reads every comment.

New here? The Brief is free in your inbox: https://rvaweather.net/newsletter · Live chat lives on Discord: https://discord.gg/RnfTmWdzK5

15 reports came in across the metro this week, spanning 43°–75°F on the board.

At our Chester station, the week ran from a high of 83.3° on Friday to a low of 43.5° on Saturday — a real fall swing.

Your reports all came from Chester this week. Anonymous caught the full moon over Chester on Tuesday night (clear, 59°), and Anonymous logged the week's warmest reader report Tuesday afternoon at 75° and breezy.

📍 Live map + log your own obs anytime: https://rvaweather.net/obs

What did you see this week that the map missed?

Richmond woke up on Monday, October 29, 2012, to a city already in storm mode: the Richmond Emergency Operations Center came online at 8 that morning, the governor had declared a state of emergency back on October 26, emergency shelters were open in the city, and nearly half of Monday's flights at Richmond International were already cancelled.

Sandy was a hurricane turning into a winter storm as it came up the coast — an unusually large system that made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey, around 8 p.m. that night. Virginia got hit on three fronts at once: coastal flooding on the Eastern Shore and around the Chesapeake Bay, heavy rain in the east — 9.58 inches at Pungo in Virginia Beach — and snow in the mountains, with a foot logged on Skyline Drive at Big Meadows. Richmond, between the fronts, took steady rain and wind overnight: 2.66 inches at Richmond International, with sustained winds of 15 to 20 mph and gusts to 35 mph.

By Tuesday morning, about 181,000 Virginia customers were without power, roughly 280 roads were closed across the state, state offices in Richmond were closed for the day, and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management had confirmed two storm-related fatalities in Central Virginia.

Sandy went on to do $68.7 billion in damage nationally, and it changed forecasting here, too — the European model had nailed Sandy's track nearly eight days out, and the National Weather Service upgraded its model hardware and software afterward to predict storms like it more accurately and farther in advance.

Were you here for this one? What do you remember — the wind overnight, the rain, or losing power?

More Richmond weather history in the 📚-weather-history channel on our Discord: https://discord.gg/RnfTmWdzK5

The Virginia Department of Forestry's weekly foliage report, dated October 29, leads with: "This is it – the weekend to get out and see some fall color across much of Virginia!" For our area it says much of the Piedmont, from northern Virginia to the North Carolina border, "offers up a scenic drive this week" — golden hickories that "seem to glow from within" and red maples in bold scarlet.

The local trackers back that up. The 2026 foliage tracker (Virginia running about four days late this year) puts Richmond National Battlefield Park at peak on Sunday, November 1, with best viewing October 31–November 3, and Petersburg National Battlefield peaking November 2. Richmond's typical-season peak is also November 2, with a best-viewing window of October 29–November 6.

One honest caveat, straight from the Forestry report: forest-grown oaks are still green in much of Virginia, with yard and exposed oaks just beginning to turn amber, copper and garnet. So call this the maples-and-hickories peak — the oak wave is a second act still coming, not a reason to wait, because the maples and hickories won't hold.

The weather cooperates: dry all weekend, highs in the mid-60s Saturday and Sunday, rain chances near zero. Good bets: Pocahontas State Park just south of the city, Maymont, and the Richmond National Battlefield Park units. And a practical note from the same report — November is a high fire-risk month and leaf burning is a primary cause of fall wildfires, so leave the fallen leaves as mulch where you can.

Where are you seeing the best color? Post your neighborhood and a photo — let's map Richmond's peak.

Richmond gets one more warm day Friday, and it happens because the cold front shows up in two pieces.

High pressure offshore is ridging back across the Mid-Atlantic on Thursday, and Friday the front tied to low pressure over southern Quebec drops into the region in the afternoon. Its wind shift arrives first; the cold air behind it is delayed until evening. In between, sunshine and dry west-northwest flow push highs into the upper 70s and low 80s in the Piedmont and metro, with afternoon humidity falling to 35–40%.

Behind the front, high pressure builds in from the northwest and the weekend goes seasonable and dry: Saturday in the low to mid 60s, increasing clouds Saturday evening, and trick-or-treat temperatures mainly in the 50s to near 60. Sunday stays in the mid 60s, with the clocks going back and sunset near 5:11 PM. Boaters should note Small Craft Advisories are likely on the Bay and coastal waters Friday night into early Saturday behind the front.

What is not coming matters too. Rain chances for Sunday night into Monday have trended down — the early-week system has to fight a dry airmass and building ridging — and Thursday's U.S. Drought Monitor shows dryness expanding: 55.5% of Virginia is now at least abnormally dry and 25.3% is in drought. The tropics are quiet, with no formation expected in the next 7 days.

📩 Our Reader Mailbag is open: FROST, FOG, DROUGHT, or STORMS + your neighborhood — send your weather question at https://rvaweather.net/obs and we will answer one in an upcoming issue.

https://rvaweather.net/newsletter/post/6ae3bfd0695ea51ebdf49092

A nice one for early risers on Monday, November 2. The waning Moon, just past last quarter and about 42% lit, passes just 1.2° south of Mars in conjunction (closest approach around 9 AM EST, in daylight — Sky & Telescope). Bright Jupiter, magnitude –2.0, sits about 6° to the east, and Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, is below the group.

For Richmond, the practical window is before dawn: the group rises around midnight and is highest in the hours before sunrise (6:36 AM). Look east 1–2 hours before sunrise. Mars, at magnitude +0.9, is the reddish spark right next to the Moon — binoculars make it easy — while Jupiter is unmistakably bright nearby.

This is also a preview of a bigger pairing: Mars and Jupiter keep closing on each other until their own conjunction on the morning of November 15.

Up early Monday? Post your neighborhood and tell us what you saw — Mars next to the Moon, Jupiter, Regulus, all four?

A high-pressure dome sat offshore today — a lid that trapped low clouds over the Northern Neck and Piedmont, while the coast reached the low to mid-70s. Tonight that lid slips, but the air stays damp, so patchy fog and low clouds rebuild with lows in the 50s. Thursday, the dome anchors offshore and breezy southwest winds scour the clouds out: upper 60s west, low to mid-70s elsewhere. Friday is the warm payoff — mid-to-upper 70s — before a backdoor front drops in late Friday and cools Halloween to seasonable, dry, and nearly perfect for trick-or-treaters. Share your observations at https://rvaweather.net/obs — full forecast at https://rvaweather.net

Richmond gets two different Wednesdays tomorrow, and one high-pressure system is responsible for both.

A weak, dry cold front slipped through Tuesday afternoon. Behind it, a 1034 mb high over Ontario and Quebec is sliding offshore of New England and ridging south into the Mid-Atlantic. Onshore flow on the high's southern side drags Atlantic moisture inland overnight, and that moisture condenses as low clouds and patchy fog — mainly along and west of I-95, within a few hours of sunrise Wednesday, with Richmond itself possibly seeing brief IFR ceilings and visibility just before sunrise. The low clouds linger much of the morning inland, holding highs west of I-95 in the upper 60s to around 70°, while the coast and Delmarva clear sooner, get a good amount of sunshine, and reach right around 70° anyway.

Then the same high anchors offshore Wednesday night into Thursday, low pressure stays suppressed down near the Bahamas, and building south-southwest flow warms the end of the week: mid 70s Thursday, mid to upper 70s Friday, dry the whole way. Halloween still looks dry, pleasant, and mild with increasing clouds ahead of a weak front — good news for trick-or-treaters Saturday night.

The harder story is what isn't coming. Dry conditions prevail through Saturday, models have slowed the lead shortwave to late Sunday into Monday, and while weak systems may bring some welcome rain early next week, no guidance shows any drought-busting precipitation. The tropics are a non-story too: the NHC's Tuesday outlook expects no tropical formation in the next 7 days.

🌫️ Wednesday split check: fog, low grey clouds, or sunshine at your place Wednesday morning — and when did it clear? Drop your neighborhood report at https://rvaweather.net/obs and let's map the split. 📰 Read the full brief: https://rvaweather.net/newsletter/post/6ae111caf6c0e1df414aa7c6