Currently in Boston — September 27, 2023: Lots of sunshine

The weather, currently.

The next couple of days will feature lots of sunshine blended with a few clouds and this dry pattern is likely to continue for quite a while. I'm looking for temperatures in the mid-60s for Wednesday and Thursday afternoon.

On Friday a weather system will pass to the south. As long as the system stays far enough away we will not see any rain but clouds will probably make it into the region. Temperatures will be in the '60s. Over the weekend as that system pulls away Sunshine returns and temperatures will start to moderate getting back into the '70s by the end of the weekend. This nice dry weather is likely to last much of next week. This may end up being one of the longest dry stretches we have seen this year.

— Dave Epstein

What you need to know, currently.

With drought affecting broad swaths of the Mississippi River valley, river levels have dropped so low that saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico is creeping upriver in the Mississippi itself. At its current rate of progression, the Mississippi will turn too salty for water treatment plants at New Orleans to produce drinking water in just a few weeks.

Since saltwater is more dense than freshwater, the saltwater is actually moving upriver along the riverbed — within the river itself. Federal engineers that maintain the river channel have built a partial dam designed to slow the saltwater’s upstream progression, and increasingly extreme measures will need to be taken once the saltwater reaches New Orleans — like transporting freshwater by barge, and hastily building a water pipeline to the city.

Similar events happened in 1988, 1999, 2012, and again last year — but this one seems especially severe.

As global warming melts ice worldwide, sea level rise will make problems like this worse not just for Louisiana, but all coastal cities worldwide.

— Eric Holthaus

What you can do, currently.

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