Category: climate

It was a HOT JULY over most of the CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES but that was not the case for the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes.

As promised I have posted the national images of July 2023. The short story is it was the 7th warmest and 45th wettest for the CONUS. In Michigan it was the 58th warmest and 5th wettest on record.

Heavy Rain was forecast for yesterday afternoon into mid morning today. The slides below show the what actually happened.

We forecast heavy rain between I-94 and I-96 and that is exactly what did happen. The heaviest rainfall report showed 4.50 inches in Middleville, most of that area had between 1″ and 3″ of rain from the event.

Cool and Wet over Lower Michigan into mid August. Warmer temperatures are expected late in the month.

Cooler than normal temperatures are expected to prevail over a large part of the northern CONUS into mid August.

We continue to see an overall eastern North American trough and western upper level ridge prevailing through the 3rd week of August. It does however look like a case of discontinuous retrogression by the later part of August as the models show a large upper ridge developing late in the month over most of the Continental United States (CONUS).

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.