Oncoming Heat Wave Could Last A Week Or Even More

All that orange in the middle of the country on the National Weather
Service home page is heat warnings and advisories. (The red in
the Rockies is fire weather alerts) Those heat advisories and
warnings will spread east and will likely include
Vermont by Saturday or Sunday. 

After last night's rain, you can feel the humidity out there for sure. It's still not all that warm today - only in the 70s - but that will change over the next day or two.

Here marks the start of a miserable stretch of humid, hot weather here in Vermont. And it might go on longer than we thought it might.

The worst of it still looks to come on Sunday and Monday, but it will linger beyond that, despite the prospects of a "cold front" (Ha!) Monday night or Tuesday.

Before we get to the heat,  today looks like an interesting day, especially the further south and east you go in Vermont and New England. As you know, it rained last night. Thank you, we needed it.

But now, the air is very humid, and any showers and thunderstorms that get going today will move quite slowly. This sets the stage for local torrential downpours, and the possibility of isolated pockets of flash flooding.

The vast majority of us will see no problems with this today. But a few locations, bullseyed by downpours, could get into a dangerous flash flood situation. The highest risk of that happening, such as it is, comes in southeastern Vermont, much of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut, southern Maine, and parts of southeastern New York.

Obviously we hope that no flooding occurs at all, but enjoy any further rain you get today. Chances of rain are pretty low over the next week. (The best chances of thunderstorms during the heat wave appear to be over northern New England, but even there, it will be hit and miss.)

Tomorrow, Friday, will be a typical hot summer day in Vermont. Temperatures will get into the 80s to around 90, and the humidity will be up there. Uncomfortable, yes, but a decent beach day as it won't be too extreme.

Saturday still looks worse, with highs in the 90s across most places in Vermont, with high humidity to make it even more fun. Burlington's record high of 93 degrees that day is threatened.

The main show continues to look like it will be Sunday. I doubt Burlington will make it to 100 degrees that day, but it's still possible. (Some computer models, and some human weather forecasters, continue to hold out the possibility of 100 on Sunday.) The record high for the date in Burlington is 96, and I would not be at all surprised if that record is broken with a 97 or a 98 degree reading.

Monday stays hot, (mid 90s) but you'd think we'd look forward to what will be going on up in Ontario and Quebec. A cold front will be lurking up there and approaching us later in the day. I still think that could set us up for some scattered, but strong thunderstorms later in the day Monday or in the evening. We'll see.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that it now looks like that cold front will actually sweep through the North Country by Tuesday. The bad news is that temperatures behind the front will "plunge" to "bitterly cold" readings in the upper 80s to around 90 Tuesday and Wednesday.

Yep, that front won't have any oomph at all. A small bubble of warm high pressure behind the front will just merge with the heat ridge that will stay over the eastern United States and keep us hot and humid.

At this point, I don't see any signs of a real cold front coming through until sometime after next Thursday. For what it's worth the American computer model doesn't have any kind of decent cold front coming through  until Sunday, July 8. Yep, a week from Sunday. Ugh.

By the way, a heat wave in Burlington, and the rest of Vermont for that matter, is defined as at least three consecutive days with highs of 90 degrees or above. By my count, there have only been 73 heat waves in Burlington since the 1880s.

The longest and worst heat wave came on August 10-17, 1944 when Burlington endured eight consecutive days in the 90s. One of those days during the 1944 heat wave got to 101 degrees, which is the still the hottest day on record for the Queen City.

Do know nights will stay uncomfortably warm through the period, so if you don't have air conditioning, prepare for a definite lack of sleep.

If overnight lows in the upper 60s to mid 70s with a lot of humidity sounds bad, it's because it is. But it could always be worse. There's a report from a city in Oman, on the Arabian Peninsula, only fell to 108.7 degrees. Yikes!    That would be a new world record for hottest overnight low temperature anywhere on the planet.

Stay safe in the upcoming heat!