I know we all probably want to forget about this past Saturday but I just wanted to put some perspective on our weekend rainy and cool weather. 60 degree rainy weather in June is not all that unusual. On average, over the last 30 years we’ve had at least one day in June with .25” or more of rain and the high temperature only in the 60s. That includes 2005, what turned out to be the hottest summer in Syracuse history and also 2002 when we topped 100 degrees in August and we ended up with 26 days in the 90s. I’m not saying that we are all of a sudden going into a scorching hot pattern; I’m just saying that whether it is a hot or cool summer overall we will almost always have a day or two of rainy cool weather in June.
Enough about our rainy cool weather, though. As you can probably tell things have changed weatherwise here in central New York. In the short term, things are blocked up here in the eastern part of the country. Saturday’s rain maker is just off the New England Coast and that has kept things wet back to New York City. They have had rain 17 of the 22 days in June and Boston has had below normal temperatures almost every day this month. Monday they were 63 with a gusty northeast wind to go along with a third of an inch of rain. Anyhow, that storm has things bottled and that means the area of high pressure over the Great Lakes that is controlling our weather right now will do so into the middle of the week.
One other thing I’ve noticed on the computer models for the rest of the week is that this is that Monday’s nice weather is the start of a pattern that is going to act more like summer. Jet stream winds aloft are forecast to along the US Canadian border. This is more of a zonal flow that keeps us seasonably warm with cold frontal passages every few days and scattered thunderstorms (Thursday and Sunday in this case). Beyond this weekend there are some questions whether this pattern holds. Both the GFS and European models hint at a trough trying to develop in the East next week. That doesn’t necessarily mean bad weather. It would mean below normal temperatures but by then ‘normal’ is 80 degrees. If the trough isn’t too deep (or amplified) we could still get into the mid to upper 70s. The troughy pattern, though, does make it a bit tougher to forecast periods of showers and storms. More to come.
