KANSAS CITY, Mo. – We’re not done with summer quite yet. After a comfortable Saturday, including a very pleasant Saturday night, the end of the weekend featured soaring dew points and muggier air. That’s how we’re starting the week with dew points in the mid-70s. It’s a muggy start to the week for sure and that’s the way the week is going to go.
With the noticeable increase in the dew points for the next couple of days, there will be a big increase in the heat indices with those values soaring into the 100-110° range it appears.
Heat advisories are in effect and while the rain chances are there perhaps for the middle of the week, odds are there isn’t going to be rain at least into Thursday if not the weekend.
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Forecast:
Today: Sunny and hot. High in the mid-90s with heat indices in the 100-110° range after lunch. Breezy as well.
Tonight: Fair and muggy with a bit of a breeze too. Low in the mid-to-upper 70s.
Tuesday: Windy conditions but remaining hot. Highs in the upper 90s. Heat index values between 105-110°.
Wednesday: Not much of a change. A big less wind and a small chance of rain, mainly towards northern Missouri. Highs in the upper 90s.
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Discussion:
It was an eventful weekend of weather. Certainly not so much for Kansas City, at least after the big storms on Friday night. There were good rains with those storms, which will also help to contribute a lot of moisture in the steam heat that’s going to be with us this week. The nation as a whole saw a lot of rain in certain areas. The northeast part of the country is still getting the rains from Tropical Storm Henri, which came ashore over the weekend. The heaviest of the rains is breaking up but it’s still persistent around the Long Island, New York area and parts of the northeast.
Henri came ashore as a tropical storm near Waverly, Rhode Island. It wasn’t a hurricane at the time as it was losing its tropical characteristics. The rain though was impressive well away from the center of the storm. Check out the high amounts in New Jersey especially.
Some 8-10 inch totals in there. Here is a close-up:
The wind aspect of this wasn’t so great in the end, but the rain aspect was impressive. There was significant flooding in parts of the northeast including New York, Connecticut and New Jersey especially. The flooding rains in the northeast were worsened because of the pre-rain that Fred delivered for some of those areas saturating the ground before the “main show” arrived.
Meanwhile in Tennessee, the flooding was even worse and more dramatic and deadly. Setting a record for a 24-hour state rain total is impressive.
Shattering a record though by almost 3.5 inches is pretty impressive in its own way.
I had to use a different scale to show the total rain west of Nashville (on the right side of the map below). There are some 20-inch indicators in there:
Only 13 other states have reported heavier rains in the 24-hour period, and that includes any crazy rain totals from tropical systems. These were just from slow-moving thunderstorms. For those in Johnson County, Kansas, think about the 8-inch totals from last week and now double that.
The devastation was total in many areas.
These flooding rains, and more importantly the intense rain totals, are being driven by a warmer atmosphere overall around the world. Warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air holds. That moisture, especially in summer scenarios, can be more easily converted to heavier rains, and as a result we see what we see these days.
The warming atmosphere didn’t create the individual systems but there is a chance that it made them even more efficient in terms of rain production.
This too may have slipped by you over the past few days: It rained on the summit in Greenland for the first time in record history there.
Here is a report on that from the National Snow and Ice Center:
That rain and the prolonged above-freezing temperatures helped to do this.
Crazy.
Back home into Kansas City, it will just be a hot week.
There actually could be a degree or two added to some of those numbers, especially for the weekend.
Very little, if any, rain is expected this week as well.
We’ll be due for a cold front (we’ll see how strong it is) in about a week or so.
The feature photo is from Carolyn Humphrey Delaney. This was out towards Manhattan, Kansas on Friday night as the storms were really cranking up. Nice shelf cloud!
Joe
