Heat Peaks Today. A Forecast And Random Thoughts On This Unusual Vermont Hot Spell

Sun sets at the end of a torrid Vermont day yesterday. The large, hazy cloud
to the left and above the sun is the remnant of a thunderstorm that suddenly
developed over the Adirondacks yesterday evening and then just
as quickly dissipated. 

UPDATE, 4 PM MONDAY:

So far, record high of 97 degrees today in Burlington, Vermont, exceeding the old record of 96.

As hot and awful as it will remain the rest of the day, attention is turning to thunderstorms.

A weak trough or disturbance is heading our way, and forecasters now think thunderstorms between now and midnight will be a little more widespread than first thought.

Unlike on Saturday, when storms were very reluctant to develop, some good ones have gotten going in western New York and Ontario.

I think some of these will hold together and reach eastern New York and Vermont. Also unlike Saturday, all of the region is at risk for storms.

This will definitely be hit and miss. Many areas will get no storms, or just hear thunder in the distance. Perhaps as many as 50 percent of us will get an actual storm. A very few locations will get strong gusty winds and torrential rains this evening. Keep an eye on the sky and try to stay cool.

Thunderstorms end by midnight or shortly after tonight. Hot again Tuesday and Wednesday, but a bit less humid, so that will be nice.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION:

Today, as advertised will bring us the peak of the big heat wave that will go on through Thursday. If you don't have air conditioning, bet you didn't sleep well last night in parts of the Champlain Valley.

It is quite a morning around Burlington, Vermont. As of dawn, the lowest overnight temperature had reached 83 degrees. The heat index was 88 degrees at 5 a.m., having slipped below 90 degrees just two hours earlier.

The people at National Weather Service in South Burlington are certainly impressed by these stats. While Senior Forecaster Peter Banacos  wrote the discussion in the pre-dawn hours, the temperature was still 85 degrees. He wrote:

"The south wind around 10 mph feels like a misplace trade wind from  the tropics, a surreal Vermont weather experience."

I'll say.

If there are no thunderstorms to bring rain-cooled air to the National Weather Service office before midnight tonight (an iffy proposition) Burlington will set the all time record for hottest minimum temperature for any date since they started keeping track of this stuff in the 1880s.

Because we're starting out so warm, we'll have no trouble getting into the mid and upper 90s today. It could still possibly reach 100 degrees.

Burlington on Sunday managed to tie the record high for the date of 96 degrees. I guess that's a mini-bonus, given the predicted high was 97 or 98 degrees. Montpelier on Sunday set a record high for the date at 92 degrees. The summit of Mount Mansfield got to 83, just shy of its all time record high of 84 degrees.

OPPRESSIVE AND AWFUL DETAILS

Today - another bonus! The humidity will decline by a pretty much non-perceptable level. That "decline" in humidity is just background noise for us humans. It's still awfully muggy out there.

However, that the humidity will be that tiny bit lower could help the atmosphere get hotter than yesterday, since "drier" air can help temperatures rise more under sunshine. Also,  overall temperatures a few thousand feet overhead might be a couple degrees warmer than Sunday could also encourage temperatures in the Champlain Valley to approach 100 degrees.

Needless to say, the National Weather Service's first-ever Excessive Heat Warning remains in effect for the valleys of Vermont today. Elsehere in the state, a heat advisory still goes on.

Speaking of humidity, dew points in some spots across the North Country were higher than I can ever remember. The dew point is the temperature at which we'd have to go down to in order to create dew or fog.

If the dew point is over 70 degrees, most of us will feel ridiculously uncomfortable. High dew points make hot weather feel even worse. For instance, at 2 p.m. Sunday, the temperature at the National Weather Service office in South Burlington, Vermont was 95 degrees, with a dewpoint of 73. That translated to a heat index - what the air felt like to us humans - of 105 degrees.

By the way, Burlington spent nine hours in a row with a heat index of over 100 degrees. I hope you're not wondering why the National Weather Service has issued an excessive heat warning.

In the St. Lawrence Valley of northwest New York, the dewpoint was even more ridiculous. At Massena, New York, the dewpoint at one point Sunday was 81 degrees. That's unusually high for places like the ultra-sultry Gulf Coast, never mind Arctic northern New York. I don't think I've ever seen dewpoints that high that far north.

To make matters all the more worse, an Air Quality Alert is in effect for Vermont today. Pollution from the big cities along the East Coast is streaming north toward us. When it's this hot, the sunshine interacts with pollution to create high ozone levels, which can be dangerous, especially for people with pre-existing health conditions. It's all made even more risky because those people with the health problems are also under stress from the heat.

THUNDERSTORM CHANCES

As I've mentioned before, it's hard to get thunderstorms going in this type of heat wave, despite the energy all this hot air and humidity add to the atmosphere.

Think of it as being in a pot with its lid on it, heating up on the stove. Gawd knows it feels like that out there, so let's run with this analogy.

The boiling liquid in the water and air inside the lidded pot can't escape. The air outside the pot is of course much cooler than the air inside it. Thunderstorms bubble up when they can access cooler air aloft. But the thick layer of very warm air over us acts as a lid that keeps those thunderstorm clouds from towering up into the atmosphere.

But what if there was a hole in the lid of our boiling pot of soup on the stove? Then steam would rise pretty high above the pot in the kitchen. That would be akin to an updraft finding some cool air aloft and forming a thunderstorm.

During heat waves like this, an updraft caused by say, a mountain, finds a "hole" in the lid of warm air. Then a thunderstorm develops instantaneously and becomes strong fast. That's why isolated thunderstorms develop. They last only as long as the updraft can find the cooler air above, which is not very long in these situations. The updraft moves a few miles down the road, and the thunderstorm quickly collapses into nothing.

We did see exactly that scenario happen near Lyon Mountain, west of Plattsburgh, New York last evening. There could be a isolated thunderstorm or two this afternoon in the mountains today, but the chances are low. Just don't be surprised if you do see an intense but very brief boomer somewhere out there today.

This evening and tonight, there's a somewhat better chance of thunderstorms. The remnants of a weak, now pretty much dead cold front will approach. This disturbance might help take the "lid" off our boiling pot of soup, our heat wave.

This will lead to scattered storms overnight, kind of like what happened Saturday night. Not everybody will see a storm after 6 p.m. today, but a few of us who do could face some pretty strong, gusty winds and torrential downpours.

The "cold front" such as it is, will have moved through by tomorrow morning. The temperature will probably "only" hit the low to mid 90s on Tuesday, and the humidity will drop a unnoticeable smidge again.

It won't be until Friday, when a cold front that really means business will end this long, strange Vermont heat wave.

LIKE A WINTER STORM

To me, a heat wave like this is kind of like a winter storm without the icy roads. The advice we get is the same as during a bad snowstorm: Don't overexert yourself outdoors, check on the elderly, stay inside if you can.

Driving to work yesterday, the streets, parks and sidewalks did not look like a normal summer Sunday in Vermont. Usually there's lots of people out walking, jogging, running around the park. Yesterday, nobody was out, it seemed. It was eerily quiet. People were hunkered down, waiting out the heat, just as they do as they wait out the storm in the winter.

HEAT EVOKES MEMORIES

Funny how these rare strong summer heat waves, the kind we get in Vermont only once every few years, evokes strong memories. I guess that happens because anything that's unusual plays with your brain.

Back in the 1970s, there were a few summers in Vermont that featured some big time hot spells, much like the one we're currently experiencing.

This heat wave takes me back to my youth in West Rutland, Vermont. My dad, Red, owned a tavern, called Marble Valley Restaurant, but everybody called it Red's Place. It was the local hangout, where quarry workers, truck drivers, and the barely employed in this decidedly not picture-postcard working class town would go after their shifts ended. They'd all console themselves, or recharge with a few cheap drafts of Schlitz or Shaefer or Utica Club.

Last night, the muggy night air took me back to Red's Place to an evening that was eerily similar.  Those summers,  I'd go down there to the bar at 10 or 11 on those nights, walking the 15 minutes or so from our house to the bar, working up a sweat in the stuffy air.

The front door of the bar was wide open, in a vain attempt to catch any breeze that would somehow drift down Marble Street and into the bar. Inside, it was even hotter than outside. Overhead, a fan slowly, listlessly spun, having no effect on the heat but slightly stirring the dense clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the bar like an acrid fog.

Middle aged men, half drunk, very tired, sat hunched over the bar. I wasn't sure if they were weighed down by the heat or life. It was probably both.

I'd stand by the door of Red's Place, trying to catch a breath of fresh air that wasn't to be. Off in the distance, faint flashes of heat lightning played above the mountains. The distant flashes seemed so half-hearted I'd swear they were being worn down by the dense humidity. Beyond Marble Street was the big West Rutland marsh, where frogs croaked their weary disapproval of the heat.

On the jukebox, Patsy Cline sang "She's Got You." The song's melody seemed to somehow transmit that we'd been transported to a lazy, hot Georgia night.

This description sounds negative, but it's a cherished memory, and I thank the current heat wave for bringing it back to me. See? There's a positive side to everything. To give you a taste of this, listen to Patsy Cline sing "She's Got You."

Why Is Everybody Ignoring Louisiana?

Louisiana is experiencing the nation's worst
disaster since Superstorm Sandy. Why haven't we
paid more attention to this calamity? 

The question in the headline of this post is being asked more and more in weather geek circles.

The ongoing flood disaster in Louisiana has certainly been in the news, but it hasn't gotten the attention of other calamaties of similar size.  

Louisiana is probably on par with Superstorm Sandy in 2012 in terms of how widespread the destruction is.

The Weather Channel has the latest tally: 

So far, 11 people have died. The flooding had destroyed or damaged at least 40,000 homes. About 30,000 people and 1,000 pets have been rescued. So far, at least 40,000 people have sought FEMA disaster assistance.

In Ascension Parish (parishes are akin to counties in other states) at least 15,00 homes and businesses are flooded. In Livingston Parish, home to 138,000 people before the flood, it's estimated taht 75 percent of the homes are total losses.

I'm sure the death toll will rise. NOLA.com reports that they haven't even really begun door to door searches yet, and there are probably victims in some of these flooded houses.

Bottom line: This is huge.

So why has the media sort of yawned over this one?

Marshall Shepherd, writing in Forbes, has several theories.  Among them: The storm didn't have a catchy name like a hurricane, i.e Katrina.

The news cycle is full of other big stuff: Trump, unrest in Milwaukee, the Olympics are all competing for news viewers. Marshall also says the flood evolved over the weekend, when news organizations aren't nearly as staffed or engaged as they are during the workweek.

Marshall brings up a rather scary, sad reason Louisiana might have been downplayed in the national conscience: There have been so many huge floods lately that this one seems like old hat.  We've had a ever-lengthening string of enormous so-called 500 year floods. South Carolina. Texas. (twice!) West Virginia, Maryland.

And here we go again, another flood. When something becomes routine, it's not news anymore. Of course, if big floods become so common that they aren't news, something's wrong.

It's probably a combination of climate change, which makes epic rain storms and floods more likely, and the fact that we're paving over flood plains that is causing this. (If you pave over forests, marshes and fields with shopping centers and neighborhoods, the water will no longer harmlessly fill up a bayou. It will flow into people's houses instead. )

The fact that floods that wreck thousands of homes, affect thousands of people at one time has become routine and a "new normal" should be frightening to a lot of us.

If this "new normal" means all these victims are ignored, then they don't get the help they need. As NOLA.com put it in a headline: "National Media Fiddles While Louisiana Drowns."

People are doing heroic work in Lousiana to help flood victims. But it takes the glare of the national spotlight to force as much aid into the disaster zone as possible. If the general public is more aware of a catastrophe like Louisiana, the more likely they are to dig into their pockets to help.

Or as NOLA.com put it: "As Louisiana well knows, the loosening of the recovery purse strings is directly commensurate to the number of people who are made aware of the scope of the devastation. In this case, where national news coverage has been scarce, locals have every reason to worry that recovery funds will be just as scarce."

Let's just hope lots of attention, and relief money and supplies for Louisiana flow into the state faster than the flood waters did.





rce.

But broaden the focus a little, and some links appear. The frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events have increased globally, said Kenneth Kunkel, a climate scientist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

“Each decade, it has been higher than the previous decade, for about the last 30 to 40 years,” he said.

Both the land and the oceans have been warming up, which has increased the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, he said. The oceanic moisture feeds into the storms that form over land. It is likely that the storm in Baton Rouge last week produced more rainfall than it would have 40 years ago, Kunkel said.

"Without Warning" Tornado News Teaser Spawns Twitter, Weather Geek Storm

This inaccuate NBC Nightly News teaser rightly
raised the hackles of many meteorologists. 

Yesterday, more tornadoes hit South Carolina and Georgia, a day after other twisters srruck Mississippi and Alabama.

Like most news organizations,  NBC Nightly News dutifully reported on these storms. They teased it with an image of an ugly big tornado with the words "Without Warning."

Here's the problem: The tornado that they pictured, and every tornado that struck the Southeast the past couple of days was preceded by a tornado warning from the National Weather Service.

The NWS did their job and warned everyone of the tornado danger to the best of their ability.  The proof is in the pudding: While there was widespread damage, nobody died in the tornadoes and there were only a few minor injuries.

Yeah,  many people saw the tornadoes coming and took cover. But the urgent National Weather Service tornado warnings also surely prompted people to seek shelter, and that saved lives.

The "without warning" news teaser on NBC raised my hackles, and that of a lot of other tornado watchers, weather geeks and people, like me, who have facts on their side and know the National Weather Service is not "always wrong" but almost always right.

Meteorologist Brandon Sullivan of Oklahoma City saw the NBC News "without warning" teaser and Tweeted, "Whom among my weather followers believe this to be true of yesterday's tornadoes?"

The answer: Not many.

But there was a lot of debate on how exercised we should get about what I believe is a misleading teaser and how we should respond to it.

In my view, the inaccurate "without warning" tornado teaser on NBC was largely about grabbing viewers and web hits. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO you understand.

I'm guessing that "without warning" is a way to grab eyeballs, viewers and web hits to the story.

I've been in journalism a long time. You want to grab readers. You want to get people to watch your reports, follow you. What's the point of producing news if nobody is paying attention to it?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with telling the story in a compelling, thoughtful way. In journalism, you must do that.

But you have to be accurate, though. The "without warning" teaser fails that test.

Which is too bad. I watched the actual complete NBC Nightly News segment on the tornadoes and storms and as far as I can tell he actual reporting was accurate. As you always want to do in journalism, NBC soundly captured the human element of the story by interviewing tornado victims.

Maybe the question is what do you mean by "without warning"

Operational meteorologist Matt Lanza in Houston Tweeted "'Without warning' can mean a lot of things beyond a forecast, but it's tough for us to accept that."

For instance, Lanza says, if you wake up tomorrow and your house is hit by a tornado, regardless of forecasts, the fact that your house was destroyed by the twister kind of came without warning, because a half hour before the tornado, you didn't know the home would be destroyed.

A bigger issue is how much of a lead time cancels out the meme that the tornado was without warning? You really can't issue a tornado warning for a very specific location unti you see signs of it on radar. Which means you only have a half hour lead time or less in most instances.

I don't think the public, or many in the news media, understand the scientific limits of how far in advance you can warn of dangerous weather, like tornadoes.

In this week's tornadoes, forecasters knew four or five days in advance that the area around Alabama faced the risk of twisters, but there was no way to tell which specific towns would be hit.

As Texas environmental scientist Tom Gill Tweeted: "Until we can tell them 'a tornado will hit 742 Evergreen Terrace at 1:56 p.m. Friday,' they'll say it was without warning."

The "without warning" meme you see in so many news media stories about extreme storms is also an annoying cliche. When you can't think of an interesting way to tell a news story under deadline, you resort to these tired old phrases.

This dilutes the accuracy of news media accounts of storms.

Which frustrates a lot of people, including Dr. Marshall Shepherd. He knows a lot about the intersection of weather forecasting and media, since, among many other things, he is a meteorologist, hosts The Weather Channel's "WxGeeks" show, and writes about weather and media for Forbes.

His Tweets about the NBC Nightly News report showed his, and our exasperation. Shepherd Tweeted:  "Major media, PLEASE refrain from Knee Jerk, 'Without Warning" stuff about tornadoes. It is Sloppy reporting. Weather community beyond that"

Shepherd also highlighted the sad irony behind the news media slavishly reporting on a rodent's  Groundog Day long term forecast for the rest of the winter while seemingly dismissing meteorologists' tornado warnings as inadequate.

One of the meteorologists who accurately warned the public in advance of the tornadoes this week is James Spann of Alabama, who sighed, "I am really getting tired of these nitwits."

If you really need convincing that meteorologists' warnings are actually quite good and save many lives, watch this video of Mike Smith discussing the issue at a recent American Meteorological Society gathering.

Smith cites example of example of how the National Weather Service, private weather companies like AccuWeather and television meteorologists have saved countless lives with their timely tornado warnings.

All this is not to say we let any meteorologist off the hook. If the National Weather Service, television or private meteorologists fall short, through incompetence, circumstances beyone their control or any other reason, we DO need to hold them accountable and find ways to improve forecasts and weather warnings.

In fact, I can think of several meteorological shortcomings that need to be addressed. Examples include short staffing and equipment failures at the National Weather Service, and social media weather enthusiasts who promote hysterical hype rather than fact based forecasts. 

I honestly don't know how we stop the news media from inaccurately portraying meteorologists as not providing warnings. I guess the only thing to do is, every time this sort of thing comes up, complain loudly but rationally to the media outlet in question.

Which is why I was so glad there was such a Twitter storm over NBC Nightly News' "no warning" bullcrap about this week's southeastern United States tornadoes.

I hope they're listening and taking this to heart.

El Nino Putting Progosticators Into A (Probably Wrong) Winter Forecast Tizzy

A looming El Nino might, maybe, bring welcome
rain to California this winter, but could also
bring severe storms that cause mudslides
like this one during the 1997 El Nino.  

There's been TONS of hype this week over what El Nino will do to the winter weather in our Great Nation.

First of all, it's August. Should we really be looking forward to winter that much?

Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again. Long range forecasts are often wrong. So take anything you hear about this coming winter's weather with a Mack truck sized grain of salt.

First of all, let's update ourselves on El Nino. It's a periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean that disrupts weather world wide.

That's especially true if a particular El Nino is strong. This one is shaping up to be a doozy, possible the strongest on record or close to it.

They're calling the current building pattern the "Godzilla El Nino."

There is some basis for some of the winter forecasts inspired by this strong El Nino. More often than not, El Ninos cause wet winters in California and in the southern tier of the United States. Less reliably, but still quite often, an El Nino will cause a mild winter in the northern Tier of the United States.

So, that means California's drought is going to end, us New Englanders aren't going to shiver to death as we're buried under feet of snow like last year, and the South will have plenty of water for next spring's crops, right?

Not so fast. All kinds of other factors can influence the winter weather. El Nino is not the final arbiter.

The winter forecast is most crucial for California, which is still being crushed by an epic four-year drought.  If El Nino brings those heavy winter rains to the Golden State, happy days will be here again, right?

Well, not totally. Even if the rains materialize, the drought is so deep that it might not be fully erased by a wet winter.

El Ninos also often make California warmer than average. If that happens during the winter, more of the precipitation would fall as rain, not snow in the high Sierra Nevada mountains.

That would be bad, because you want a lot of snow in the California mountains to gradually melt in the spring and summer to feed rivers that supply water to lowland communities.

El Nino rains in California might also come in the form of torrential downpours. Any rain would help of course, but torrential rains would also lead to flash floods, which are obviously bad for people and property caught up in them.

On top of that, maybe the El Nino rains this time might not materialize. Why? Well, there's something called the "Blob" which has been lurking off the west coasts of the United States and Canada for at least a couple years now.

The Blob is an area of unusually warm water that has set up out there. This isn't the same as the hot water associated with El Nino, which is down off the coasts of Central and South America.

The blob of warm water well to the north isn't usually there, especially in an El Nino. This blob could change weather patterns the way it did last year, steering storms away from California and leaving them high and dry again.

This "Blob" also contributed to last year's weather pattern that brought so much snow and cold to the Midwest and Northeast.  Will the Blob attack in the same way this winter? Nobody is sure, and anybody who says they are sure is lying.

There's also the possibility that El Nino could knock out "The Blob" ensuring the hoped for wet California winter. Who knows?

There are other complicated atmospheric and ocean cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic basins which can also screw up those nice, neat El Nino forecasts.

Plus, global warming has screwed up the atmosphere, making things less predictable for any particular location on Earth.

Other outfits are also starting to make their own wacko winter predictions.

The Farmer's Almanac just released its winter forecast, and they insist much of the northern United States, including the Pacific Northwest and New England are in for another bitterly cold and very snowy winter.

That's based on their secret formula for weather predictions. You need a grain of salt bigger than that Mack truck for their forecast, I'm afraid.

Bottom line: I'll tell you in March how the winter weather of 2015-16 turns out.

Global Heat Records, Data Coming Fast And Furious

NOAA says the globe had its warmest
March in modern record this year. The only
major cold spot was the northeast U.S. and
eastern Canada.  

While I continued to shiver in winter cold up here in northern New England during March, the world as a whole had yet another record warm month, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. 

On a global basis, March averaged 0.85 degrees above the 20th century average for the month. But if you take the whole world into account, it's impossible to get a month that is several degrees warmer or colder than normal.

That 0.85 degree departure from normal in March is the third greatest of any month since the NCDC has kept track of such things.

The only notable cold area on Earth in March was the northeastern United States and eastern Canada.

This is the latest in what has seemingly become a constant string of new heat records across the globe.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center said Arctic sea ice reached its lowest extent on record for the month of March.

As Dr. Jeff Masters noted in a recent blog post, five nations or territories have already recorded their hottest temperatures on record so far in 2015, and the year is still young. The year with the most nations or territories with new all time heat records was 2010 with 21 such records, but two of those records have since been broken.

The fingerprints of human-induced global warming are all over this latest barrage of hot climate data,   but it's not the only hand in the mix.

A developing El Nino is very likely helping to boost the nearly worldwide heat.  When this periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean hits, global temperatures tend to spike upward, no matter what humans might be doing to the planet.

The combination of global warming and El Nino means there's a good chance 2015 will be the hottest year in modern records for the Earth as a whole. Right now, 2014 stands as the hottest times man has experienced since well before the 1880s, when record keeping got a whole lot more detailed.

Very likely, there might be some years, maybe 2017, or 2018, that are "cooler" than 2014 or 2015, because El Nino, if it develops, will have probably ended by then. This could bring on a very subtle, very temporary global cooling for a couple years, maybe.

When we get a year or two that's not a new worldwide heat record, we'll hear the inevitable, "See, the world is cooling." from those who would oppose any efforts to combat global warming.

But those are just political talking points. Because of the myriad factors and cycles that affect climate, some years will be warmer than others, even as the general trend line goes up and up and up.

That's what you need to follow, the general trend line. And certainly not a random cold spell in which some U.S. Senator can declare global warming a non-issue because he went outside and made a snowball during the winter.

Bill Maher, that very blunt political comedian, had a blistering segment on climate change during his show this week. You might agree with the guy, you might not on all kinds of subjects he touches upon, but you have to admit, Maher cuts to the chase.  

Bill Maher mocking Ted Cruz for when Cruz
compared himself to Galileo while saying
he doubted climate change exists.  

Like him or not, Maher goes for the kill.

In his climate rant, he mocked politicians who continue to say they don't know enough about global warming because they're not scientists.

Kind of like saying legislators can't appropriate funding for a new road because they are not dump trucks.

Maher said many GOPers' public stance on climate denial isn't for the general population. He says it's for the corporate donors who keep them in office..

Or as Mahar crudely put it: "It's not why politicians suck more than ever, it's who they're sucking more than ever.

The whole video is worth watching, if only for the bitter laughs. So go ahead:

Whirlwind: British Columbia Teachers Strike Goes Round and Round

Whirling winds whip up papers, placards in
British Columbia teachers' strike.  

There's a teacher's strike in Surrey, British Columbia, and they were out picketing, as strikers tend to do.

Then some odd weather excitement disrupted the picket lines.  

The dust-devil like whirlwind sent placards and papers hundreds of feet into the air. I wonder if Mother Nature was commenting on the strike?

Here''s the video