Brutal heat's gone, but for how long?

We've caught a break in the Carolinas for nearly two weeks, as the searing heat wave that brought a steady string of 100-degree days has retreated to the west.

But the strong high pressure system responsible for the very hot weather from late June through the first week of July isn't gone.  It's off to the west, baking the Mississippi Valley and Great Plains. It could return, and some meteorologists predict it will.

Actually, it makes sense to expect the high pressure to build back over the eastern United States eventually.

In the meantime, we're enjoying a break. A weak trough of low pressure has persisted for the past two weeks in the Southeast, buffering us between the Midwest heat pump and another strong high in the Atlantic.

Temperatures frequently get into the 90s, but that's typical of summer in the Southeast. On occasion, a weak cold front has pushed into the Carolinas and died, but the front has brought more frequent thunderstorm activity and a few days when high temperatures stayed in the 80s. It looks like Saturday will be such a day.

The pattern appears to hold next week. High pressure will try to build inland from the Atlantic, but the weak cold front that moves into the Carolinas this weekend and then dissipates will still leave a presence in the region. That weakness will allow for thunderstorms to develop every afternoon, keeping temperatures in check.

If this were the height of hurricane season, we'd be in trouble.

The weak trough of low pressure across the Carolinas would provide a very attractive path for any tropical storm or hurricane steered toward the eastern United States, but the tropics have been quiet since early June, fortunately.

Paul Pastelok, a long-range meteorologist with Accu-Weather, said earlier this week that he expects a few more surges of heat in the East later this summer. Pastelok even advanced the idea that some of those heat waves could come in September or even early October.

Incidentally, I saw a report this week from Accu-Weather, in which one of its meteorological partners says 2012 could wind up as the second-hottest summer on record. Weatherbank Inc. measures heat by the number of cooling degree days. A cooling degree is every degree above 65 for an average. In other words, if the high is 75 and the low is 57, giving us an average for the day of 66, we had 1 heating degree days.

Weatherbank measures the total number of heating degree days at 59 major U.S. cities, from May 15 to Sept. 15. Meteorologists say we got off to a slow start, because June was rather cool. But we're making up for lost time. Weatherbank's Steve Root predicts we'll have the second-highest number of heating degree days this year.

The all-time mark of 60,402 was set last summer. Second-most was 60,078, set in 1951. The company keeps records back to 1950. The average for a summer is 51,923, but the average over the past 10 summers is 56,134 (there's some ammo for you climate change believers).

In Charlotte, the average temperature so far this month is 82.2 degrees, which ranks seventh overall. But with a few more hot days, we easily could reach No. 3 all-time.