U.S. Plains Braces For Severe Storms, While Epic, Weird Mideast Storm Proves Fatal

There hasn't been a tornado in Oklahoma yet this year, which is very bizarre and record breaking.

Massive flooding in Tel Aviv
this week. 

It looks like there's a good chance that Oklahoma's good luck in the tornado department will come to an end next week. (Of course, Oklahoma has had terrible luck with wildfires and droughts this year.)

A classic mid-spring weather pattern is unfolding, especially in the middle of the country, and that means there's the risk of severe storms and tornados across the Plains and Midwest.

Meteorologists are confident this will happen. But they're not confident as to how bad this might get. The main ingredients for a severe weather outbreak are certainly there in the middle of the week:

Dry air coming in from the west, wet air coming in from the Gulf of Mexico, a decent sized storm and winds veering with height.

That's a standard recipe for spring tornadoes in the United States.

Those ingredients must come together though just perfectly to cause a significant, scary, deadly and destructive tornado outbreak. You really can't tell if that will happen often until hours before the event.

With a decent amount of luck, maybe there won't be many tornadoes, and those that do form will be relatively weak. That would mean just your standard issue damage -- local power outages, trees down, barn roofs blown off, a few broken windows - bad but they'll deal with it.

Or, if there are strong tornadoes, there's a lot of open space in the middle of the country. If a strong tornado forms, we can pray that it stays over open farm country and causes little damage.

The worst-case scenario in this one is a strong tornado goes through a populated area, like Moore, Oklahoma in 1999 and 2013, or Joplin, Missouri and Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 2011. Not likely, but possible this time.

MIDDLE EAST CHAOS

Outbreaks of severe weather and tornadoes are pretty common in the United States during the spring. But extreme storms aren't so common in the Mideast, and they had a doozy this week.

An unusually strong storm came off the Mediterraneann Sea during the week. As the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang put it, few countries in the region were untouched.

Ten teenagers died when caught in flash flooding near the Dead Sea in Israel. Four other youths died in the region during the flooding. Huge amounts of hail buried parts of Syria. Massive dust storms engulfed Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Parts of Israel had a third of the normal year's worth of rain in a day or two. Tel Aviv, Israel, had an inch of rain in an hour. Jerusalem had two inches. Both cities were awash in destructive flash floods.

Severe flooding also hit Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt.

The storm that hit the Mideast had plenty of cold air aloft, and plenty of moisture from the Mediterranean. The combination made the air extremely unstable, which caused the massive downpours and winds.

If there was a bright side to the chaos and tragedy from the weather in the Mideast, it's that the strom hit during a serious drought, so it partly re-filled reservoirs and alleviated the dryness.

Videos of the Mideast show the chaos.

Here's a view out of a plane window as the aircraft flies into a massive dust storm this week in Saudi Arabia. The plane landed safely:



Check out this incredibe hailstorm in Arad, Israel:



Here's a street in Jerusalem overrun with water. Notice tables and chairs floating by:



Tel Aviv, Israel was chaotic, too, in the hail and flooding:

Possible New World Record High Temperature Set

A hazy sun sets over Lake Champlain during a hot spell
last year. Although it hasn't been too hot in Vermont
so far this summer, other area of the world
have had crushing heat. 

Here in Vermont, so far it's been a wet, occasionally humid, but not particularly hot summer.

That ain't true in some parts of the world, where the heat this year has been crushing.

A city in Iran in June week reached 129 degrees, which is the hottest temperature on record for that country.

It could also be a world's record for heat, but nobody knows for sure.

Although the 129 degree reading in Ahvaz, Iran was reliably measured, other standard bearers for record worldwide heat, um, let's just say not so much.

Many people take the reported temperature of 134 degrees in Death Valley, California on July 10, 1913.

However, weather historian Christopher Burt has said that the 134 degrees was not possible from a meteorological perspective and therefore unreliable.

Another purported world heat record of 136 degrees in Libya has been debunked.

The 129 degrees in Ahvaz, Iran felt even worse than it was. The heat index was reported at 142 degrees.

Earlier in June, the world saw a record hottest overnight low temperature. The temperature bottomed out at 111.6 in Khasab, Oman on June 17. Talk about an impossible night for sleeping!

Even worse, there was a reported dew point temperature of 91 degrees.

Dew point is a measure of atmospheric moisture. It's the temperature at which the temperature would have to fall for moisture in the air to condense into cloud

On the other extreme, on June 20 another Iranian city reached 116 degrees with a dewpoint of -28 degrees. In other words, the teperature would have to plunge by 143 degrees for moisture to condense out and form ground level clouds, said Dr. Jeff Masters at the Category 6 weather blog. 

The relative humidity that day was 0.36 percent. For comparisons sake, a dew point in the low 50s with a relative humidity in the 30s would represent a refreshingly pleasant non-muggy summer day in Vermont.

Meanwhile, in the western United States, the heat continues to grind on as well. The extreme heat of late June has waned a bit, down from readings that were as high as 127 degrees in Death Valley.

However, temperatures remain above normal out there. As of today, heat advisories and wild fire alerts are up in quite a few locations from Washington to Arizona.

Down in Las Vegas, the temperature reached 114 degrees Thursday, just one degree shy of the record for the date. Las Vegas residents must be sick of the heat. Yesterday was the 22nd day in a row in which the temperature reached at least 105 degrees.

That's the longest stretch of such weather on record in Las Vegas.

Record heat is forecast for southern  California and parts of Nevada through the weekend.

Here in Vermont, I see few if any signs of hot weather coming this way anytime soon. Temperatures will be near to slightly below normal for the next week. And yes, we have an almost daily chance of showers and thundershowers for at least the next five days.

Hot Times Coming To New England, But If You Think 90 Is Bad......

People try to escape the heat in Lahore, Pakistan recently.
Photo from Getty Images

A spate of summer weather is finally heading toward New England, as temperatures over the past couple of days have climbed to seasonable levels, and will go upward even more by Sunday.

Sunday through Tuesday across the Northeast will see highs well into the 80s in most of northern New England, with 90s thrown in from central New England and points south.

Many people welcome the summer heat, though some people who work outside dread it.

Some record highs will probably fall in several cities from the Rockies to the East Coast over the next few days, but this won't be the nastiest heat wave ever

It could be worse, though..

 However, as I perused Dr. Jeff Masters's Catagory 6 weather blog recently, I found news of some truly awful heat elsewhere in the world.

In the blog, guest writer Maximiliano Herrera detailed incredible heat records that hit big sections of the Middle East, east Asia and parts of Europe in late May and early June.

On May 28, the temperature reached 128.3 degrees in Turbat, Pakistan, making it the hottest May temperature recorded anywhere on Earth ever.

Oman and Pakistan had their all time hottest temperatures. Not hottest for the date or the month. I'm talking hottest ever.

In Iran, the temperature reached 127 degrees, Oman broke its all time record high of 123,

Of course, they're used to heat in the deserts of the Mideast and in places like Pakistan and India, but not like this Extreme heat of this nature is very, very dangerous.

For instance, we know at least 10 people died in an extreme heat wave in parts of India this week, and that toll will likely rise.

In Europe, Norway had its hottest May temperature on record with 90 degrees, and Austria also had its hottest May reading on record at 95 degrees at the end of the month.

One weird record high was set at the top of a 15,584 mountain in the Italian Alps when the temperature reached 42 degrees.  Chilly, yes, but still a record high for that elevation.

Enjoy summer!

It Feels Like It's 163 Degrees In Iran

A man in Baghdad, Iraq tries to cool off
as temperatures climb to 124 degrees Thursday
Photo by Ahmad Al Rubaye/AFP Photo.

Now I feel wimpy.

The other day here in Vermont, I was whining about it being so stuffy outside - temperatures in the 80s with dewpoints in the low 70s.

That's certainly warm and humid, but also definitely not dangerous, unless I was vigorously exercising in those conditions, which I wasn't.

Parts of the Middle East, though, have been truly dangerous in recent days. The heat index - a rough approximation of what it feels like outside if you take temperature and humidity into account - was 163 degrees at one point.

Of course, such extreme conditions are incredibly dangerous for anybody stuck outside, or without access to air conditioning.

The Weather Channel notes that more than three million Iraqis are displaced by violent conflict. Many areas of the country suffer through electricity outages and water cuts, putting a lot of people in danger.

Tragically, we already have reports of at least 53 children dying in an Iraqi refugee camp due to the heat. I'm worried we'll hear about a lot more deaths in coming days.

The Iraqi government declared a four-day holiday late this past week to keep people from working outside in the conditions and to save electricity.

The water temperature in the Persian Gulf is well into the 90s, and water that warm releases LOTS of moisture into the air, building up humidity. When a breeze blows off the Persian Gulf into places like Iran and Iraq, the humidity and heat become ridiculous.

The dewpoint is a measure of relative amounts of moisture in the air. It's the point at which the temperature must fall to create fog or dew.  The higher the dewpoint, the more unbearably humid it feels.

For most people, if the dewpoint gets up to around 70, it feels quite muggy and uncomfortable.  A dewpoint of 90 is ridiculous, and that's what happened this week along Persian Gulf shores. That yielded a heat index of around 160 at Mahshahr Airport in southwestern Iran.

Some of these Mid-Eastern Countries came close to their all time hottest temperatures over the past few days.  It was 127 degrees in Mitribah, Kuwait Thursday, just short of the nation's all time hottest temperature of 128.5 degrees set two years ago.

It was 125.6 degrees in Kanaquin, Iraq, and 124 degrees in Baghdad.

Record and near record heat waves are consistent with rising temperatures in the face of climate change. Unprecedented heat waves have struck many areas of the Northern Hemisphere since May, including Pakistan, India, Alaska, parts of Europe and the Pacific Northwest in the United States.

It's all about me, of course, so as I sit in Vermont and watch these extreme heat waves, today I'm relaxing in temperatures that are expected to be just shy of 80 degrees and dewpoints in the comfortable upper 50s.

But I'm sure one of these summers in the near future, Vermont will get its record heat wave, too. It's just a matter of time.