Now that the storms have passed us, we will have a pretty quick and dramatic warm-up as we head into Air Race Weekend. A dry, warm and stable ridge of high pressure is building onto the coastline, giving us sunny skies through the weekend. High temperatures will start in the upper 70s on Friday, climb into the mid-80 on Saturday and peak on Sunday near 90 degrees. Winds should be fairly light throughout.

We’ve been speaking about hurricanes. Several years ago, Tropical Storm Ernesto and Hurricane John were threatening coasts in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. That confused Kirk. He wrote to tell me that he looked up the hurricane names for that year, and John wasn’t there when the “J”s came around. He wondered if the storms changed names somewhere along the way.

First off, hurricanes don’t change names once they get them, and they get them once they achieve tropical storm status. Where Kirk apparently went wrong when looking for John’s name on a list was looking at the wrong list… the one for Atlantic hurricanes. Tomorrow, I’ll talk more about the naming conventions for hurricanes around the globe.