Not Usually Good News When Weather Pattern Turns "Interesting". It's Getting Interesting

I'm not saying anything super bad is going to happen, but a really wavy weather pattern coming up for the United States could spell various kinds of trouble next week.  

One forecast of the weather pattern in 
about a week. Ridges on both coast
with a dip in the jet stream in the Midwest
would create more wildfire risks out west.
Pattern could steer a hurricane if there
is one into the East Coast. Chilly
in the Midwest

It just depends on what moves where and when. 

Here's the problem: A deep southward dip in the jet stream is setting up in the middle of the nation next week. That means northward bulges, called ridges, will set on either side of this dip, one on the West Coast and one off the East Coast. 

The one on the West Coast is almost certain to stir up trouble.  It'll cause another bout of record high temperatures, which means the wildfires out in that part of the nation will surely worsen during this. 

The East Coast ridge is more problematic. The center of the ridge will probably build over the Canadian Maritimes.

It's the height of hurricane season. Many hurricanes form in the Atlantic this time of year, and a lot of them take a northward turn well east of the United States and so they harmlessly blow out to sea.

The type of weather pattern getting ready to set up with that high pressure in the Canadian Maritimes would steer a hurricane westward across the southern Atlantic Ocean then push it toward or up along the East Coast.  

Of course, it's far from a guarantee that this would happen. First you need an actual hurricane, and there's none out in the Atlantic right now. Tropical Storm Omar is a weak thing far off the North Carolina coast and will soon die out in the north central Atlantic.

Tropical Storm Nana could become a hurricane, but it's southwest of Jamaica and heading west toward Belize. Terrible for them, but not a problem for the United States. 

If a hurricane does form in the next week or so - again definitely not guaranteed -  it would have a higher than average chance of hitting the East Coast.  Which is bad, because we've already enough hurricanes to deal with this year. 

This weather pattern will bring chilly air from Canada to the middle of the nation, so that will be the first truly autumnal cold front of the year out there. I wouldn't be surprised to see frost advisories in places like northern Minnesota next week.  (Frost advisories aren't that out of the ordinary in the north woods of Minnesota this time of year).

For us in Vermont, those cold fronts would either come through weakly or die out on the way here due to that ridge to the east of us. Temperatures would stay close to normal through next week, although there may be periods of warmer than normal temperatures and humidity during all this. 

This weather pattern would also increase the odds of wetter than average weather in Vermont starting sometime next week. Moisture streaming north on the back side of the ridge to our east, combined with those stalled out fronts over us or just to our west would combine to give us quite a few periods of rain. 

That would be a good thing, as long as there are no hurricanes in the mix. Vermont is still abnormally dry after such a long, hot summer, so some decent rains would help.