As Expected, A Chilly Vermont Summer Morning, And Those Floods Just Keep Coming

A large rose bush enjoys wall to wall sunshine on the longest day
of the year, the Summer Solstice yesterday in Burlington, Vermont. 

It was great to have a Summer Solstice, as we did Thursday that was wall-to-wall clear skies and sunshine here in Vermont. That's certainly not something that happens every year.

And here's the weirder thing. I was out late working in the yard because visibility stayed great past 9 p.m. I finally went inside, not because it was too dark but because I was getting too cold. Ahh, summer in Vermont.

There were reports of readings of 33 and 34 degrees up in the Northeast Kingdom this morning. Similar readings were reported in northern New Hampshire. It was 30 degrees over in Saranac Lake, New York, so they had another June frost over there. They just had one last week, too.

It will warm up today, and after a showery, coolish weekend, and a somewhat cool start to the week, things will get warmer and more humid by the second half of the upcoming week. There are even some signs we could get a strong heat wave somewhere around the week of July 4.

Elsewhere in the nation, the floods I've been speaking of go on and on. They're never that widespread, but they are intense.

Flooding at the Richmond, Virginia airport
this morning. 

The latest victim was Richmond, Virginia, where more than seven inches of rain came down early this morning. A whopping 4.55 inches of that rain come in just one hour --- that's incredible. The rainfall rate at one point was five inches per hour.

As you might imagine, the flooding in and around Richmond is severe. The Richmond International Airport was closed this morning because swaths of the airfield, the parking lots and the roads leading to the airport were under water. Parts of Interstate 64 were also closed for a time.

Areas further north in Virginia, including Charlottesville and Fredericksburg, also had significant flooding. This is Charlottesville's second nasty flood within a month.

By the way, this will be the second consecutive month in Richmond with over ten inches of rain. That's also completely off the charts.

Meanwhile, coastal Texas is still trying to recover from flooding this week. Port Aransas, devastated by Hurricane Harvey last year, drowned under 15 inches of rain from the tropical downpours this week.

Flood warnings were widespread this morning in southeastern South Dakota, northwestern Iowa and southwestern Minnesota after three to eight inches of rain this week.

Today, further flash flooding is a fairly good bet from the Mid-Atlantic states to the Ohio Valley. The threat spreads back to parts of the Plains over the weekend.

We have more videos:

McAllen, Texas, ground zero for the national crisis over immigrant children separated from parents, is also dealing with very severe flooding:



Earlier this week, there was some destructive flooding in and near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Here's the scene in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania: