Category: climate

I had my all time record one hour Rainfall rate Saturday Morning, at my Grandville Weather Station.

Exceptional rainfall occurred during the early morning hours at Grandville between 1 am and 2 am. This storm broke my all time 5 minute rainfall rate record and 1 hour rainfall rate record.

With Grandville Weather Data at my house having records back to the fall of 1995, the 2.95″ of rain that was recorded in both my 4″ rain gauge and my Davis Weather Station (nice that they agreed) , is my all time record rainfall in one hour. The previous record was 2.30″ during a thunderstorm during the evening of July 17 2oo6 between 9:45 pm and 10:45 pm. The 0.50″ in 5 minutes is also a new record for 5 minute rainfall, exceeding the 0.41″ on June 18th 2021.

The pictures above are from our home, looking north out of what is my son John’s bedroom window. The time posted on the pictures are EST, so you have have to add one hour to get the correct time for these images.

The second and third week of July have been cooler than normal, however, during the fourth week of July a heat wave (3 days or more in a row with highs of 90 or more) is expected for Southwest Lower Michigan. Don’t get to use to that through, cooler temperatures return by the 1st of August.

It’s been cool for the 2nd and 3rd week of July, however a dramatic change to hot weather is expected from Wednesday through Saturday.

Over the Great Lakes and Midwest, our Drought continues. There has been beneficial rainfall over some of the area, during the past week, but this has not been enough to really end the on-going drought. Above normal rainfall is expected over some of this area in the next two weeks but even that will likely not end the drought. It will however help some.

Recent rainfall has helped our drought improve some, but with rainfall anomalies being between 4 and 7 inches over the past 3 months, that has not come close to ending our current drought.

I wanted to add more depth to what I wrote yesterday. The question I want to address is how much rain do we actually need to end this drought? You may be supersized by how much rain it would take!

To end our current drought over southern Michigan we would need around 6 inches of rain by the end of July. This is near record totals for July at most of our climate sites. It would seem unlikely given our current weather pattern we would get that much widespread rainfall. So while we do expect more rain in the next month than the previous month, the expected rainfall will likely fall short of ending this drought.

After nearly 2 months of very limited rainfall, our area (Southwest Michigan) finally had around an inch of rain between the 25th and 26th of June. My blog below will look at the impact of that on our drought and the forecast going forward for the next 2 week to see if we will have a mitigation of our current drought.

Our current drought and it’s impacts continue across Michigan, this blog looks at what is happening now and then what we should expect going forward into mid July.