OK, A Little Vermont Rain. That's A Start. More Coming?

I had to water my gardens way too early starting in May, shown here
and it looks like that state of affairs will continue. We got some rain
yesterday, and a little more is in the forecast, butI don't see anything
drought busting in the near future

The good news is that in parched, Burlington, Vermont, yesterday's rainfall just about doubled the amount that has fallen so far this month.

The bad news is that brings the month's total to just 0.70 so far, which is more than two inches on the light side.

Overall, Wednesday's rainfall was not impressive, but at least pretty much all of Vermont had a least a little wetting.

Generally less than a third of an inch fell in most places, but there was a nice little bullseye of nearly three quarters of an inch around Franklin County in northwest Vermont, where I live. A bit more rain likely fell after these observations were made Wednesday morning.

Looking ahead, for people who want a drought buster deluge, it's not in the cards. But at least there are decent chances of rain in the forecast.  We'll see if that pans out.

Today and Friday will be dry, aside from some isolated, light showers that won't amount to much of anything.

A relatively small storm coming in from the west for Saturday has a little oomph to it, so it has the potential to drop between a quarter and a half inch of rain, which would be nice.

This is one of those tricky systems to watch, because it can bring a package of surprisingly severe thunderstorms with it.  However, the expected track of this storm would take the severe weather south of us.

Instead, as it looks now at least, Saturday will really not be a nice summer day, with clouds, a little wind and frequent showers. Which to me, is great news for the soil moisture out there.

An upper level low is forecast to settle over us Sunday through Tuesday, giving us a decent chance of afternoo and evening showers all three days.  Again, these potential showers won't amount to a huge amount. However, like I keep saying, we'll take anything we can get at this point.

By the way, long range forecasts, always iffy I understand, call for dry, warm weather heading into early July.

Chilly Weekends, Toasty Weeks And Rain Spigot To Shut Off Again

My husband last evening finally made me put away the snow shovel
 that has been standing guard by our front door since November.
Which is of course why the National Weather Service suddenly says
there's the possibility of a few snowflakes Saturday on the peaks
of the Adirondacks. I admit it won't snow at my house, though. 

It seems we have fallen into a rough pattern in which we have warm weeks and chilly weekends here in Vermont.

It's been going on since early May. Not every weekend gets the cold shot, but most of them have.

True to form, Saturday will be a very oddly cold day in Vermont in a month that has so far had pretty close to average temperatures so far.  It's just been a yo-yo, though.

High temperatures Saturday won't make it out of the 50s.  That's what weather is normally like in April. For June, it's 20 degrees colder than normal.

It'll be so cold that I wouldn't be surprised if a few snowflakes come down at the summits of the Adirondacks and northern Green Mountains.

Luckily, cloud cover will keep all of us, except maybe the highest mountain summits, above freezing Saturday and Sunday nights.  At this point the cold hollows look like they will escape frost. The rest of us certainly will stay above freezing. .

Sunday will be a little warmer, but still on the cool side for June.  Then, following the pattern we've had for awhile now, it will turn toasty and a little humid by mid to late week, with highs well into the 80s, as it looks now.

It's too soon to tell if next weekend will turn cool again.

LACKING RAINFALL

Most of Vermont, and most of  New England for that matter,
are now regarded as "abnormally dry" by the U.S.
Drought Monitor (yellow shading is the dry areas)/ 

This weather pattern has not bee generous with us at all in terms of rainfall.

A few of us lucked out yesterday.  The northern and southern ends of Vermont got generally a half inch of rain, locally more. The middle of Vermont, not so much.

For instance, my unofficial rain gauge in St. Albans collected 0.70 inches of rain, which was a decent enough soaking.  Burlington only managed 0.11 inches though, which is basically nothing.

A few spots might get a quickie downpour from scattered showers and thunderstorms this afternoon, but a lot of us will stay dry.  Those hit and miss showers are from the cold front which will give us the very chilly Saturday.

There might be a few  light showers Saturday and possibly Sunday, but they won't amount to anything.  Pretty much all of us can expect less than a tenth of an inch of rain for the next seven days.

That's bad, if you consider that the optimal, normal amount of summer rains in Vermont usually amount to about an inch per week.

The U.S. Drought Monitor now has all of Vermont except the Northeast Kingdom listed as "abnormally dry" which is one step below drought.  I still think at least a minor drought is developing  in Vermont.

Weather patterns will need to shift pretty dramatically to give us the kind of soakings we are accustomed to in the summer. We shall see how that turns out.

Wettest 12 Month Period On Record For The United States

It seems like for the past year, almost all I've written about in this blog thingy is flooding somewhere in the nation. Just yesterday I mentioned flooding, and it's still ongoing in the South.

If it seemed wet across the nation to me in the past year, I was on to something.

According to a factoid I came across in the Category 6 weather blog, the 12 months ending on April 30 were the wettest 12 month period on record in the United States as a whole.

As Bob Henson wrote in the blog post:

"Averaged across the contiguous U.S., the total of 36.20 inches made the period from May 2018 to April 2019 the first year-long span ever to top 36 inches. The old record for any 12-month period was 35.78 inches from April, 2015 to March, 2016."

Henson got his data from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.

Of course, the nation is big an the weather is highly variable from place to place and month to month and even day to day.

However, the United States has been trending wetter. Yearly average rainfall in the United States has increased by about two inches over the past century. That makes sense with climate change. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water, which can be unleashed in the form of heavier precipitation.

Here in Vermont, things seem to be trending wetter, too. Records in Burlington go all the way back to the 1880s.  The six wettest years have all occurred since 1973. Only one of the Top 10 driest years have occurred in the past 50 years or so.

The wet nation is resulting in a lot of flooding, but is minimizing droughts, at least for now. Nearly 90 percent of the nation is currently free of drought or abnormally dry conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

That doesn't necessarily mean the nation will avoid drought. With or without climate change, there can be wild swings from wet to dry to wet again. As you can see by the chart in this post, the trend line for the nation has been generally wetter, but with big changes year to year. Some periods are very dry, some very wet. You never know.

I guess it's just human nature that we complain about too much or too little water.

Record Highs Again, And Cheated Out Of Rain Again?

There's a slight risk of flash flooding today in southern New England
(in yellow) with a marginal risk in green. Less rain will
fall in northwestern New England, where precipitation is really needed.

It was raining hard enough in far southern Vermont this morning to prompt flood advisories for an expected one to three inches of rain in a short period of time.

The flooding, if any, was expected to be minor, and the rain was needed.

Up here in northwestern Vermont, it was beginning to look like we would be cheated out of a soaking rain again. Sure, it was raining some early this morning, but it's looking less and less likely it will amount to a  whole lot today.

After a batch of light rain goes through by 8 or 9 a.m., there's not much upstream on the radar heading this way.

Still, there is the risk of rain through the day, as more showers and storms could develop before the cold front comes through. But we are just not getting as deep a rinsing as I'd hoped.

The southeastern half of Vermont, and the eastern half of New England in general today have the highest chances of decent downpours, and maybe some local flash flooding and a risk of a few severe thunderstorm.  More rounds of storms are almost a certainty today in southern Vermont

Here in northwestern Vermont, we're also recovering from a record hot day that was a bad combination for dryness. Yes, we had the record heat, but we also had the almost wall to wall sunshine, and most importantly, it wasn't humid at all, at least until last night after sunset.

Slight risk of severe storms today in much of New England
(yellow shaded area) Less of a chance to the west.

The dry air and the heat really combined to evaporate a lot of water out of the soil and such. It just made things worse.  A dusty day indeed in the garden!

Burlington's record high yesterday was 96 degrees, besting the previous high for the date of 94, set in 1969.

Burlington has now had nine days this summer with temperatures at or over 90 degrees. That's nowhere near any kind of record, by the way.


The National Weather Service office in South Burlington tells us the year with the most 90 degree readings was 1949, with 26 such days.

That must have been a brutal summer!

There are probably no more 90 degree days on the immediate horizon, though with forecast highs in the mid to upper 80s on Friday and Saturday, it could be close. And who knows what will happen as we get into the end of July and August?

The next chance of any rain after today will come along Sunday or more likely Monday.

Summer Thunderstorms Will Be Epic Deluges In Warmer World

Satellite view of an intense mesoscale convective complex
over Kansas in 2014. A new study says these clusters
of thunderstorms will grow more frequent and intense
as global warming ramps up. 

Another study indicates that torrential drenchings and flash floods will be more likely in the United States in a warmer world.

Several studies have linked climate change with heavier rain storms. The latest takes a look at summer thunderstorms and something called mesoscale convective systems or MCS's.

These MCS's are very common in the summer especially in the middle of the United States. They are large clusters of often torrential thunderstorms that usually erupt at night.  On average, about 60 of these things form every summer.

MCS's often bring welcome rains to the corn belt and other agricultural regions of the United States, but also sometimes cause destructive flash floods. This is especially true if a particular area is hit by several MCS's on successive nights.

In a warmer world, these MCS's would get more intense, increasing the risk of flash floods, according to the latest study, which was published Monday in Nature Climate Change.

Bob Henson, writing in Weather Underground says the study "found that increased atmospheric moisture in a warming climate will help lead to a 15 to 40 percent increase in peak MCS rainfall rates, along with a 20 to 70 percent jump in the rainfall area. Together, these lead to a 30 to 80 percent boost in the total hourly volume of rain deposited by a typical MCS."

These more vicious MCS's in the future will affect almost all of us in the United States and much of Canada and Mexico.  The study indicates the MCS's will become a bit less frequent in the central United States, (though more intense.) However, MCS's will become more frequent elsewhere, espeically in the Northeast U.S and Canada.

That increase in MCS's in the Northeast is worrisome. The Appalachian chain, including the Green Mountains here in Vermont are especially prone to flash floods as water from torrential rains tends to rush down the slopes of the mountains.

Plus, the Northeast is heavily urbanized, and storm drains aren't designed for especially heavy rains.

The bottom line: I just gave you another reason to worry about climate change.

May Proving To Be Another (Sort Of) Wet Month In Vermont

Vermont has been fairly wet since February, which is a good'
thing. Other parts of the country have been way too wet. 

From my temporary perch in Yankton, South Dakota this week, I noticed Monday was another wet day in Vermont.

Precipitation has been running above normal in the Green Mountain State in May, following a trend that began in February.

So far, it's been sort of a Goldilocks rainfall pattern. Not too dry, not too wet, though we've had more than normal precipitation. But it's been the right amount.

Which means we've erased last year's drought, and spring and summer crops and foliage is doing just fine. Just perfect. Like Goldilocks would want.

The weather forecast is a bit uncertain for the next week to 10 days, but it does appear we'll have frequent chances for showers during that period. Nothing terribly heavy, but we'll get a continued supply of showers.

We've been lucky, compared to much of the rest of the United States, which has heen too wet.

Overall, the nation has been wet to excessively wet this spring. (With Florida and the Desert Southwest being dry exceptions)

Overall, April was the second wettest on record for the United States as a whole.

May seems to be following that trend, with big swaths of the nation experiencing flooding problems. On Sunday, we drove from a wedding in Kansas to my in-laws house in southeastern South Dakota.

Along the way, almost all the thousands of farm fields we saw were hopeless swamps, with huge pools of water and mud. They're behind in their planting out here, and some soggy fields have to be replanted because seeds rotted in the flooded fields.

Today, there's flood watches for a large area of the Southeast. 

Later in the week, there are signs there could be excessive rains in parts of the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys and in the southern and central Appalachians.

Up in Vermont, we're hoping we keep up the trend of wet-ish but not too wet.