Record Eastern Heat Contributes To Strange, Strong Vermont Thunderstorms

Huge hail fell near Massena, New York yesterday.
Note the quarter in the middle for scale. Photo
credit Terry S. 

As previously mentioned, the eastern United States is in the throes of a record, unprecedented September/October heat wave.

I'll get to a rundown of some of those incredible temperatures in a minute, but I first want to get to our odd Vermont weather on Tuesday.

Vermont has missed out on the heat wave, but we were close to a sharp boundary between the relatively cool air here and the record heat elsewhere.

The result was a strange afternoon and evening of out-of-season thunderstorms.   Sharp temperature contrasts can cause some pretty damn stormy weather, so we should be too surprised yesterday happened.

The forecast before yesterday hit mentioned showers and thunderstorms, a few of which could be strong

That's exactly what happened.  Even more big-time than expected. It's just the set up was odd for October.

The heat lurked just to our west on Tuesday. It was 83 in Watertown, New York, and 88 in Syracuse. A warm front was draped across northern New York and down through extreme eastern New York.

Lift in the atmosphere created by this front, and the strong temperature contrasts fired up some pretty impressive batches of thunderstorms.

The warm front was further to the west in the morning, so the first batch of strong thunderstorms rolled southward through central New York before noon Tuesday.

The next batches came in the afternoon. The initial storm was probably the worst as it crossed the international border into the Massena, New York area. There, hailstones were a little bigger than golf balls, so I'm sure some cars were majorly dented there.

That storm and more, kept coming in waves into northern New York and Vermont well into the evening.  What was odd for October is the amount of cloud to ground lightning  these storms produced.

One storm in and around St. Albans, Vermont had lightning that cut power to more than 1,200 homes and businesses, including my house.

Also odd for October, the storms produced torrential downpours. Repeated downpours and thunderstorms hit the far northern Green Mountains and the Northeast Kingdom. Rainfall totals reported to the National Weather Service in South Burlington include 3.25 inches in Westfield, 3.16 inches in Wheelock, and 2.78 inches in Island Pond.

This caused washouts and flooding.

Flood warnings were still in effect early this morning for the northern reaches of the Missisquoi and Passumpsic Rivers.

The heat ridge producing the record high temperatures is shrinking southward, and so is a cold front.

The warmth won't come back to us, but it will make a couple runs at us. There will be some rain Thursday night and Friday, but nothing too heavy.

Another storm that could tap the warm, humid air in the South looks like it will come through Monday. It's possible it could rain hard again, but that's highly uncertain.

RECORD HEAT

As strange as the weather was in northern and central Vermont on Tuesday the weather was totally off the rails in much of the rest of the nation's eastern half.

Here's a very partial list of cities that had their hottest October day on record. One of the many odd things about this list is how widespread the unprecedented heat was - from Louisiana to New York State:

Montgomery, Alabama: 101 degrees (I've never heard of 100 degree temperatures outside of the desert southwest in October.)
New Orleans: 95 degrees
Nashville: 98 degrees
Indianapolis: 92 degrees
Huntington, West Virginia: 95 degrees
Pensacola, Florida and Mobile, Alabama, 96 degrees
Syracuse, New York, 88 degrees
Erie, Pennsylvania, 89 degrees

A town in the mountains of western Virginia reported hit 94 degrees, which is the hottest temperature on record there for any month, not just October.

Unrelated to the eastern United States heat, Utquiagvik, Alaska, (formerly Barrow) on the northern tip of Alaska had a record high of 43 degrees Tuesday.

There were also a slew of record lows this week in Montana, where deep snow cover from that epic snowstorm last weekend, helped temperatures fall as low as 1 degree above zero in Cut Bank, Montana.

The unprecedented heat will go on for the next couple of days in the Southeast and South, and more all-time record October highs will be threatened today.





Utqiaġvik (Barrow) has set a new record high temperature for October 1 at 43F (+6.1C), previous record 39F (+3.9C) in 1989. The October record high temp of 44F (6.7C) set Oct 10, 2016