roardog

It was a different type of summer around here than what we’ve become used to the last few years. A lot more days with lower dew points allowing cooler nights. It seemed like we were never going to have summer dew points below 60 again after the last few years.

It definitely gets easier this time of year when the sun goes down so much earlier. Over here the sun doesn’t set until 9:20 in June so when it’s hot outside, I’m usually in bed by the time it really starts to cool down. lol

Except that it actually doesn’t predict that. It has the entire east coast with slightly above normal temps. It’s also not a winter forecast, it’s a Nov-Mar forecast.

There’s a difference between a top ten warmest summer from consistently high dew points causing the overnight lows to stay above average and a top ten warmest summer from extreme afternoon highs. Around here, I can have a well above normal summer mean from having lows around 70 and highs in the mid 80s, which we’ve seen a lot of in the last decade. That’s hardly newsworthy. It also helps that top ten warmest or coldest in the summer takes a much smaller departure from average than the winter.

You guys will be glad to know that the Weatherbell prelim Nov-Mar forecast has the entire East Coast between normal and +1 for temperatures with an emphasis on a colder December.

It's great that Will takes the time to do this. His method is very reliable too. There's been a lot of years where someone will try to argue against his method early in the Summer but in the end his method always does a great job and proves the naysayers wrong.

I don’t think anything exciting ever comes from a warm to the north and cool to the south pattern.

2 months ago you said strong Nino. lol

I was thinking a couple days ago how it feels like it’s been unusually windy for this time of year. More wind coming on Thursday with the heat.

I can’t remember if you guys had the derecho in mid July ‘95 or if it went north of you but that day that the derecho hit here, it was 97 before it hit and I can remember what it was like with no power for a couple of days after that.

Speaking of high dew points. I can remember a day sometime in the mid 2000s where we had dew points around 80 all day along with a completely overcast sky. Temperatures were in the low to mid 80s with dew points around 80 all day with literally no sun. Low clouds socked in all day. I can’t remember too many days where it was that warm with no sun.

Best climo?

There’s been plenty of 70+ degree dew points in Michigan in June. Maybe not upper 70s but that’s tough to do any month this far from the Gulf of Mexico. I know we had dew points well into the 70s in June 2020 before the severe storms, I think around June 8th?, 10th? Sometime around then. That day had 70+ dew points up to Gaylord.

I had a couple inches of snow in the yard this morning and there were icicles hanging from the house around noon. I’m not sure I ever remember seeing icicles hanging from a house around here at noon this late in the Spring. Typically if it does snow this late, it’s usually well on the way to melting by noon. People are worried about Sun angle in February. How about a mid August sun angle? lol

How much “old” snow do you still have?

The last real widespread below normal Summer month I can remember is August 2017. Has there even been any since?

98-99,99-00,00-01

We always had WGN on our cable provider around here. Tom Skilling was the only good source for getting an idea on how the medium/long range looked. Even though it was obviously Chicago based, Tom would talk about possible pattern changes two weeks out. You weren't getting that information anywhere else. The NWS forecast was always biased toward climo. Tom would be the only met daring enough to do something like put a temperature 20 degrees below/above normal on a 7 day forecast. This was great information before the days of the internet with all the model data available. I was always disappointed when Tom would be on a 2 week vacation and Jim Ramsey was filling in. Not that Jim Ramsey was bad but he was no Tom Skilling. lol

There could be an above normal April and still have hard freezes so another March 2012 would pretty much doom the plants/trees again.

The tropics of Illinois.

At least you got to experience some nice temperatures. I had to deal with mid 30s, pouring rain and NE winds. I hope you enjoyed your S winds and nice temps.

It’s still 3 days or so away. The SE and weaker runs should start anytime. lol

I think it was November 1997 when there was a Winter Storm Warning for 6-9 inches of snow here for the next day. This was back when The Weather Channel had the NWS forecast on the local forecast and that was how I saw the NWS forecast as I didn’t have the internet yet at the time. So the next morning I woke up to find the Winter Storm Warning gone and a forecast of 1-3 inches. We never had a flake from that storm. The Detroit area ended up getting the 6-9 inches and the northern edge made it up to around Flint where they got a couple of inches.

The NW trend back in the day used to be as much of a guarantee as the SE trend is today. I wonder if the model updates over the years are the reason for that. Maybe changes were made to “fix” that issue and have now resulted in the opposite problem. Now we just need a model that understands how far south an MCS will track in the warm months.

I think the ensembles look interesting going forward. Both the gefs and especially the eps have higher heights building in Alaska and NW Canada in the medium range. That would push/bleed cold air into the SE ridge. The red colors on the height anomaly maps don't always mean warm at the surface in a pattern like that, especially the more north you go.