Record Breaking Heat Wave Ends....(7-9-12)
The heat wave is broken. The cold front that moved through central New York Saturday continued to move south during the rest of the weekend bringing relief to some of the hardest hit areas. Today, only small parts of North and South Carolina are under Heat Advisories. With the extreme heat broken here are some of the more interesting facts and figures I found.-Washington DC was one degree off their all-time high temperature on Saturday. They hit 105 F after a morning low of 82 F. Their mean temperature was 94 F which was their highest ever.-Chicago was 103 F on consecutive days Thursday and Friday, also just one degree off their warmest temperature on record. The warmth over the past week pushed the Lake Michigan temperature at one offshore buoy to 80 F, the earliest report on record.-Today will be the first time in 12 days that St. Louis will not crack 100 degrees. Their stretch of 11 straight 100 degree days is their second longest ever.-Indianapolis, in addition to triple digit heat this month, has not had measurable rain yet in July and since the start of June has recorded only .09” of rain. Their rainfall deficit since the beginning of May is 7.76”-The heat went as far north as Wisconsin and Michigan. Lansing, Michigan reached 103 F on Friday which was their warmest day since record keeping started during the Civil War.Everyone is getting a nice break now but hot weather will return. This time it won’t be extreme heat but both Chicago and St. Louis will both be cracking 90 F again. Here is Syracuse we could be close to 90 again by the end of the week. Here is a look at the forecast from this morning’s GFS model looking at the 500 mb flow by the end of the week.
It sure does look like a summer jet stream pattern. While we did cool down over this past weekend, we still managed to crack 80 both Saturday and Sunday. We’ve been above 80 F every day this month plus the last three days of June. With it expected to stay warm (if not hot) the rest of the week and weekend we could be up to a string of 18 days in a row with 80 or better by Sunday. Believe it or not that would be one of the longer stretches in Syracuse history. If that happens there are only 7 other stretches longer than that. Just last summer we had a 24 day stretch and the record is 43 in 1949. While we may focus a great deal of the number of 90 degrees days during the summer it may be these consecutive 80 degree days streaks that give us a fuller picture of summer warmth. While using 80 F is somewhat arbitrary by looking at these streaks you are pointing out the lack of real cool Canadian air making inroads on the Northeast and the tenacity of warm to hot air masses. This is a streak will keep a close eye on.
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