Some Rain…Lots Of Heat
Well the good news is that there is rain out there, and has been off/on all morning long, but yet many are frustrated by the coverage. rainfall has ranged from nothing for many to a few hundredths for some to 1/2″-1″ for some as well. While there will be additional soaking rainfall this afternoon, thanks to a disturbance moving into the area from Lawrence (MCV or Mesoscale Convective Vortex) even this is weakening, although there is still about a one county+ wide area of rain that will affect areas from the I-70 corridor area southwards. Again, as IO mentioned yesterday beggars can’t be choosey when it comes to rainfall in a drought.
It looks like with minor exception (later tomorrow night/Sunday AM) the forecast again looks to be very dry for the longer term. The models are suggesting there may be a few pop ups sometime early Sunday…so maybe some might get lucky again or for the first time. From there we’ll just talk about a hot and mainly dry forecast.
The upcoming heatwave will not be to the extreme as what happened last week (102-107°). We’re looking more at a 97-102° type situation I think. There may also be a touch more humidity to the air as well but it won’t be anything that terrible. Again the temperature and the heat index should be within 3° of each other. Still though nasty and considering how the heat is/has taking a toll on some, this isn’t good news.
There is a ray of hope that by NEXT Thursday we may see some sort of boundary slip into the region from the Great Lakes area. We’ve seen this happen a few times this summer already and potentially may knock us down a bit later in the week. We’ll deal with that potential as the weekend wears along.
A lot of folks are talking about the heat that we’ve seen so far this summer. Many remember hot hot it was back in 1988 and 1980. I remember the Summer of ’80 well because I was an incoming freshman @ St Louis University lugging all my clothes/boxes etc up 5-6 flights of stairs in the crazy August heat out there. it was nasty!. So with those memories around and many talking to me about how hot it is and how to them, especially farmers, it’s every bit as bad as those particular years I had Ariel, our summer uber-intern start crunching some data for me. What I wanted to show you was how the Summer of 1980 and 1988 went for highs. I also had her crunch the data for 1936, the summer we hit 100° more often than any other summer (53 times) to see how the highs compared to what we’re dealing with right now, and granted we’re only about half way through this meteorological summer season. So here is what she came up with…let’s start with the Summer of 1936. Again this is strictly for June-August. Click on all these images to make them larger!
So out of the possible 92 days in the Summer season we had 73 days with highs 90°+. the summer of 1936 was our second hottest summer on record, trailing 1934 by 3/10′s of a degree.
Now let’s take a look at the Summer of 1988…that too was a very hot summer in terms of the number of days in the 90s and 100s.
Here we can see 62 days with highs in the 90s and 100s (11 fewer than the Summer of 1936).
Finally let’s look at the Summer of 1980.
That one was rough too but strictly looking at the 90s and 100s there were “only” 54 days with highs in the 90s and 100s.
What I think this really points out though is the large difference in the number of 100°+ days from the 1936 heat and the 80s heat.
If you’re wondering how we’re doing this season…so far we’ve had 26 days of highs in the 90s-100s including today’s data. If you’re asking what is average for June-August (1980-2010) …the answer is 31 days. Again so far this summer we’ve accomplished this 26 times already. So odds are by Wednesday of next week, we should hit our average in terms of the number of days in the summer where we see highs in the 90s+. By the way the average of days with highs 100°+ is about 3. So far we’ve accomplished that feat 9 times this season with more on the way.
That’s about it for today…have a great weekend and I hope you were lucky and got some rainfall. I think my yard had about 10 raindrops at least I should get a few hundredths of an inch with the MCV moving through eastern KS now.
Joe
