Matt's Weather Rapport is written by Vermont-based journalist and weather reporter Matt Sutkoski. This blog has a nationwide and worldwide focus, with particular interest in Vermont and the Northeast. Look to Matt's Weather Rapport for expert analysis of weather events, news, the latest on climate change science, fun stuff, and wild photos and videos of big weather events. Also check for my frequent quick weather updates on Twitter, @mattalltradesb
Storm clouds gather over Calgary, Canada
as a happy couple embrace last week.
Photo by Cassie Molyneux.
Once again today, thunderstorms will produce flash flooding, vivid lightning and other troubles in parts of the nation today.
It's the middle of summer, so thunderstorms are de rigeur for this time of year.
Vast areas in the middle of the country are still under flood watches because of these storms.
Besides the flash floods, thunderstorms can do amazing, surprising things. Or be incredibly photogenic.
In Calgary, Alberta, Canada recently, a big thunderstorm unleashed a horrible pelting of hail, a lot of wind and a lot of rain.
According to Buzzfeed, that storm helped create a wedding photo for the ages, especially if the couple in question are weather geeks.
The happy couple, Helen Knight and Owen Chan, posed for a photo at a park overlooking Calgary as the storm approached. Photographer Cassie Molyneux caught the dramatic scene. The photo leads this post. Click on it to make it bigger and easier to see.
Everybody in the wedding party then got caught outside in the storm and fled to a house to dry out.
Next in our summer thunderstorm tour, we learn that God must hate Wendy's fast food restaurants, judging from this brief but shocking video:
Finally, we have a beautiful time lapse video from Arizona of a thunderstorm producing a microburst.
Microbursts are violent downdraftsof air from a thunderstorm that hit the ground and spread out. They cover a small area, less than 2.5 miles in area, but can be as dangerous as a tornado.
Here you see the giant gush of rain that typically accompanies a microburst as it blasts an area of Arizona this week. Awesome video!
Getting back to the floods, videographer David Rankincaptured this flash flood, caused by mountain thunderstorms, sweeping down Johnson Canyon, Utah Monday:
Cars stranded in street flooding in the Wichita, Kansas area Monday. Photo from KAKE.com
This is the summer of flash flooding, apparently.
I've noted this already in previous posts, but yet again, a vast part of the nation is under threat of flash floods today, and many areas experienced such deluges Monday.
This just adds to epic rainfall totals for the year in some parts of the nation, a contrast to the West Coast, where the drought just keeps on grinding on.
The flash floods this week add more to the usual phenonenon we see: So many people driving into flooded streets, and getting stuck.
I guess the National Weather Service's constant refrain, "Turn Around, Don't Drown," isn't working. I don't know why. It seems pretty easy to understand, at least to my little brain.
I'm amazed at the videos, an example of which you see below, of people seeing that cars and trucks have died out as motorists tried to drive down flooded streets. But does everybody else turn around?
Of course not! Some people soldier on, thinking they have magical powers in which everybody else's car drowns in the water but theirs won't.
In the videos, you do see other people turning around instead of plunging into the water. You can almost see the thought bubble of the people in the cars that are turning around. They look at people with their stuck cars and say, "Loser."
The video below, fromStormChasingVideo.com, shows cars struggling amid flash floods in Wichita, Kansas Monday.
Wichita isn't exactly a remote, boony one road town.A little under 400,000 people live there. It's a pretty sizeable town. You'd think that if one street floods, you can turn around and find a nearby street that's not flooded and do a detour there.
So, if you encounter flooding today, no matter where you are, don't drive through it. The car and life you save might be your own.
A drowned, failed cornfield near Fairfield, Vermont after a near record wet June.
In the summer of 1998, one of the biggest El Nino patterns was in full force, warming up the eastern Pacific ocean waters to incredible heights and causing havoc with weather around the world.
In the summer of 2015, another big El Nino seems to be ramping up, and the weather, already off the rails over the past year, seems to be getting wilder.
I discovered some pretty amazing local coincidences and similarities in the weather in 1998 and this year in Burlington, Vermont, the closest major weather station to my home in northwestern Vermont.
I don't know if El Nino has a lot to do with this or not, but the summers of 1998 and 2015 are almost identical. At least so far.
May, 1998 went down as the fourth hottest May on record. That was until this year, when it moved down to fifth place. That's because May, 2015 was THE hottest May on record in Burlington. So two very warm, dry Mays in El Nino years.
June, 1998 was the third wettest on record, with 8.66 inches of rain for the month. Until this year. June 2015 is now the third wettest on record, just besting 1998 by 0.01 inch. We had 8.67 inches of rain.
On July 1, 1998, Burlington was deluged by 2.54 inches of rain in just a few hours, causing some local flooding. On July 1, 2015, Burlington was deluged by over two inches of rain in just a few hours, causing some local street flooding. (Note, two inches of rain in one day in Burlington is quite unusual. Happens only perhaps once every other year, on average)
July 4, 1998 started overcast and hazy, and ended with rain. July 4, 2015 started overcast and hazy, and ended with rain and thunderstorms.
We'd better hope the similarities break. July, 1998 went on to become the wettest on record, with 9.31 inches. August 1998 is among the top ten wettest. There are several chances of rain in Vermont coming up over the next week to 10 days.
There are important differences between the two years. There was widespread, damaging floods in Vermont in June, 1998. There were some damaging flash floods in parts of Vermont in 2015, but the trouble wasn't as widespread as in 1998.
Still, we're all swatting mosquitoes that have flourished in this wet regime. In both 1998 and 2015, some crops, like corn are drowning and dying in the mud.
The similarities between 1998 and 2015 will certainly fade in the coming months. But, as I noted, let's hope we don't break a July record for precipitation. We've had enough.
As readers of this blog well know, California is going through a multi-year, punishing drought in which there are severe water restrictions and all kinds of dire things that happen with a drought.
She just doesn't understand why Governor Jerry Brown has imposed water restrictions, or as she put it, "His main target are (sic) those really nice landscapes and lawns on golf courses and campuses and cemeteries and private property, your yards!"
Yes, Jerry Brown hates green, lush lawns apparently. He's not motivated by drought, he's motivated by his hatred of greenery! Or something like that.
"You might ask, though, why don't they just fix the infrastucture problem, why don't they just build more reservoirs and plants? After all, Califonria is a coastal state. It's got a whole ocean right there, water all around ya."
Duh! Why didn't I think of that? Or Jerry Brown?
Of course, there are naysayers. The Chicago Sun Times points outthat you can build dams, but if there's no water flowing in, you won't get a reservoir behind the dam. No water, no lake.
Palin says the reason for no desalination plants is because those evil environmentalists hate good things and say the waste generated by the plants, and the huge amounts of energy they use is bad. So you should just suffer.
Well, it's true that desalination plants are energy hogs and have environmental costs, but SF Gate says hat there are already at least 17 desalination plants in planning stages in California.
Oh, by the way, desalination plants cost between $150 million and $1 billion each to build, so there's the little matter of money.
Maybe Palin can donate the $99.99 people pay for each subscription to Palin's television channel to build those desalination plants and empty reservoirs.
Aerial view of yesterday's Lee's Summit, MO tornado.
I swear everyone has a video camera these days, and the television stations all manage to get live shots of everything lately.
So when a tornado touched down in Lee's Summit, Missouri, right near Kansas City on Wednesday, the cameras were rolling.
It was interesting that the tornado was caught simultaneously from at least three different angles during one fascinating moment. All three videos are at the bottom of this post for your viewing pleasure..
The tornado was relatively weak, which is good because as you can see it was in a heavily developed neighborhood.
As is often the case, you don't see the actual funnel reaching the ground, but the tornado sure did. Not all tornadoes have funnels that extend all the way to the ground, so this isn't so unusual.
At the moment you'll see in the three videos, a suction vortice appears in the tornado.
Suction vortices are tornadoes within tornadoes, and are often responsible for the pockets of heavy damage in a tornado path in which the destruction otherwise isn't all that great.
It's why you get images of one house that's totally destroyed - hit by a suction vortice,- while the house next door is just slightly battered, because the suction vortice missed that one.
Channel 41 Action News caught the suction vortice flailing like a madman from their vantage point in a nearby parking lot:
Somebody in one of those buildings got another perspective of the tornado. In it, you can see that same suction vortice damaging a roof of a nearby building, then zapping through some power lines. The people taking the video probably should have been inside.
Even though it was a fairly weak tornado, they could have been hurt by flying debris. Watch:
Meanwhile Action 41 news had a chopper in the air, and you can the suction vortice damaging that same roof and those same power lines.
A dust storm approaching Phoenix, Arizona this past Saturday. Photo by Pat Smith Johnson
In mid to late summer, thunderstorms develop over the deserts of Arizona. These thunderstorms can create dust storms, and it's often quite a spectacle.
This combination is a creature of the annual monsoon season out in these deserts.
The unrelenting heat of summer causes air to rise, creating an area of low pressure in the deserts.
The low pressure is not a storm system, like normal lows. It's just the fact that the air is rising, and for complicated reasons, that leads to low atmospheric pressure, at least compared to surrounding areas.
When there's low pressure, air wants to come into the area of low pressure. Nature abhors a vacuum. Weak low pressure isn't a vacuum, of course, but still, things try to find an equilibrium. So air comes in to replace the air that has risen because it's so damn hot.
Some of this air comes from over or near the Gulf of Mexico. You know how gawd awful humid the Texas coast can get this time of year. Some of that humidity travels toward the deserts. The humidity is enough to help trigger thunderstorms.
The thunderstorms, by their nature, are hit and miss. There's still a lot of dust and sand out in the deserts that hasn't been drenched by a thunderstorm in the past couple days. That's pretty much true no matter how active the monsoon and thunderstorm activity has been.
Strong outflow winds from these storms often blow out into these dry areas, and kick up a ton of dust and sand. These outflow boundaries, and the dust they pick up, can travel many miles.
A thunderstorm a dozen or more miles from Phoenix can eventually envelope the city in dust.
The hottest time of year in the deserts is June, with that strong sun. By late June or early July, the process I just described has started the monsoons. The first ones, right on schedule, hit in the last few days.
ArizonaStormChase captured this awesome dust storm near Casa Grande, Arizona. Pretty cool!
Wildfire sweeping through Wenatchee, Washington
amid unprecedented June heat last weekend.
Hot times have come this summer to parts of the United States, and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere with incredible heat waves breaking all time records.
The trend is continuing into July.
It seems where I live in Vermont was the exception: June was a little cool and a LOT wet, with near record amounts of precipitation and no days making it to 90 degrees. But it's a totally different story elsewhere.
74 weather stations had all time record highs for the entire month of June, and two set all time high temperature records.
The heat has truly been extreme in Washington State and nearby areas.According to Weather Underground, the high temperature of 113 degrees in Walla Walla, Washington, if verified, will not only be the hottest June temperature on record in that city, but for the entire state.
In Walla Walla, the new June record broke the old record of 109 degrees for the month, set just the day before.
List of cities that had record
warm Junes. Click on image
to make it bigger, easier to see.
Lewiston, Idaho reached 111 degrees, which is a June record for that city, and possibly for the entire state of Idaho.
All time June high temperature records were set in Yakima and Spokane, Washington; Kalispell, Missoula and Helena, Montana and Meacham Oregon.
At least 19 cities in the northwestern United States, and in Alaska, had their warmest Junes on record. Some cities broke the record by very wide margins.
As you'll notice in an amazing video at the bottom of this post, embers from the main wildfire traveled long distances to set buildings in Wenatchee ablaze.
The drought and heat extended into western Canada and Alaska. Revelstoke, a ski resort town in British Columbia, reached 103 degrees on Sunday.
June wildfire near Willow, Alaska.
Photo by Mat-Su Borough.
Because of early season heat, Alaska is off to its worst fire season in history.
Alaska is closing in on 2 million acres charred by fires already and it's early in the fire season. This year is on pace to easily surpass 2004 as Alaska's worst fire year on record, when more than 6 million acres burned,says the Washington Post The fires in Alaska are particularly dangerous. Permafrost is underneath much of Alaska's forests and scrub land that's on fire. If thre's a fire, there's dark ash left.
The black ash collects the heat of the sun, helping to melt the permafrost underneath. When permafrost melts, it releases carbon dioxide into the air.
All this smoke from the wildfires is spreading far and wide. Part of northeastern Montana was under a dense smoke advisory Monday due to Canadian wildfires. Smoke has spread through much of the middle of the country.
People in areas where the smoke gets really thick face health hazards. Fine particulates in the smoke can cause lung damage.
Expect bouts of smoky haze anywhere in the United States over the next few weeks because of these fires. The smoke would be ironic in many parts of the South and Northeast, parts of which had a record wet June.
Elsewhere, Europe is settling into a nasty heat wave to open the month of July. Already, Madrid, Spain set a new high temperature record for the month of June with a reading of 104 degrees for two days in a row.
Today's high temperature of 36.7 Celcius or 98 degrees Fahrenheit is the hottest July temperature on record in the United Kingdom
The blog also reports that temperatures could reach 100 degrees in Paris by Wednesday.
The impending heat wave in Europe brings fears of another disaster like in the summer of 2003, in which weeks of record heat killed or contributed to the deaths of up to 35,000 people.
The building European heat is caused by an "omega block"in which areas of low pressure create a high pressure area between them and push hot air far north into Europe.
The omega block can sustain itself for long periods. The high temperatures strengthen the ridge, the ridge creates more heat and you're stuck with a long, dangerous hot spell that in the worst scenarios can last weeks,as Capital Weather Gang notes.
If you're wondering if all these heat waves are related to global warming, they could well be. It's hard to pin a specific weather event on global warming and lots of factors cause heat waves, but as the world warms, we've long been told we can expect more frequent and more intense heat waves.
The hot spells in the Northern Hemisphere this summer are completely consistent with what the climate scientists have been telling us would happen.
It looks like it's going to be a long, hot, fiery summer.
Here's life in Wenatchee, Washington last weekend.
