Tag: climate

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.

Rain is on the way for Sunday into Tuesday, this will help our developing drought over Lower Michigan but it likely will not be enough to end it.

It’s been unusually dry is Lower Michigan since early May, this is expected to change by Sunday.

You may have noticed we have an Elevated Layer of Smoke our skies over the western Great Lakes. The smoke is coming from Canada.

The smoke in the sky the past few days is coming from western and central Canada due to wildfires there.

The Latest Forecast Guidance Continues to Suggest Cooler than Normal Temperatures and Below Normal Precipitation most of the Remainder of May for the Great Lakes Area.

Over Southwest Michigan, May has largely been drier than normal and cooler than normal Overall the next two weeks will mostly be that way.

Cool and Wet into Tuesday, than mostly dry weather and becoming warmer than normal by the weekend and that is expected to continue into the 3rd week in May.

It may be cool today and tomorrow but warmer than normal temperatures are expected from this coming weekend through the 3rd week in May.