Officially, this isn't likely to become the season's first heat wave; it just feels that way.

At Philadelphia International Airport it didn't get below 74 this morning, and if that stands as the low temperature for the day; the old record-high minimum for May 29 is 72.

The caveat is that a strong thunderstorms could drop the temperature in a hurry, said Walter Drag, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, and they will be prowling the area late this afternoon and this evening.

Those potent thunderstorms have pulled away, and before this heat surge is over, we may be rooting for encores.

We've mentioned the high dew points expected during the weekend, and how they are going to push head indices into the July-like 90s.

But the nights also are going to be heat-wave uncomfortable with overnight lows having a hard time breaking 70.

The storm cluster that hammered Burlington County has crossed the river, and right now appears to be going to town on Bucks County.

It has left quite a calling-card in Philly. Between 2 and 3 p.m., 0.87 inches of rain was measured at Philadelphia International Airport.

A wind gust of 43 m.p.h. also was reported at the airport.

On a day with tropical-style humidity, a powerful thunderstorm is pounding parts of South Jersey.

It appears the ferocity is focused on Burlington County, and the National Weather Service says that up to 3 inches of rain have fallen in the Medford Lakes area.

A flood warning is in effect for that area.

As everything else, the tropical-storm season is off to an early start, but that may be about as meaningful to the rest of the season as the snows of Halloween were to winter.

That was the message this morning from the National Oceanic and Atmopsheric Administration, which released its annual hurricane outlook for the Atlantic Basin.

Concurring with outlooks released by Colorado State University, Accu-Weather Inc., and WSI Corp., NOAA sees a near normal season in the basin, which includes the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

The temperature forecast for the Memorial Day weekend has a decidedly July look, but what impresses us is the outlook for discomfortl.

Dewpoints are expected to reach the upper 60s, and with temperatures in the upper 80s, heat indices will creep toward the middle-90s.

It's a shame that the dewpoint, a measure of the absolute moisture content of the atmosphere, is so poorly understood. It is a handy way to get an instant read on discomfort, as opposed to the "relative humidity" and the heat index.

However chilly the Atlantic may be, the Shore tourism industry somehow baked into our minds years ago that Memorial Day weekend marks the unofficial start of summer.

This weekend, we won't need much convincing, with July-like humidity and the temperature making a run at 90 on Monday.

After two decades of steaming summers and a long run of abnormally warm months, one could reasonably wonder if the weekend is a foretaste of the next three months.

Alberto, knighted as the season's first tropical storm at 5 p.m. Saturday by the National Hurricane Center, is swirling its way to oblivion.

The 11 a.m. hurricane-center advisory has Alberto barely qualifying for a name, with peak winds of 40 m.p.h., or 1 m.p.h. above the minimum requirement for a tropical storm.

It was off the coast near the Florida-Georgia border and heading due east without so much as a watch or warning in its wake.

We noted in today's Inquirer article that officially the first four months of the year constituted the warmest Jan. 1 through April 30 period on record in Philadelphia.

Yet again we learn that the weather in Philadelphia or any other locality is not necessarily a bellwether of what is happening worldwide.

The most recent world climate report by the National Climate Data Center states that globally those first four months were the coolest such period in four years.