Tag: Drought

The US Drought Monitor shows 87% of the CONUS in some sort of drought. Will we get enough rain to mitigate this over the Great Lake area?

That 87% is the highest percent of the CONUS in drought, going back to January 2000 (or maybe even farther).

US Drought Monitorhttps://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap.aspx

At the risk of going overboard on the Summer of 2023, I have another set of charts you may want to look at.

I through it would be fun and informative to see the frequency for hot days across our Nation.

Here I have the frequency for highs in the 90s across the CONUS (Continental United States), the longest streak across the CONUS, the frequency of lows of 70 or more and I few more NCEI charts to show how hot of a summer this was both nationally and regionally. I also have a few precipitation maps so you can see that the great frequency for hot weather was were it rained less, relative to normal for that area.

I have added 2 slides to this presentation ( 8 and 9). These two slides show that what one uses for the “normal”, greatly impacts what the departure from normal looks like. I used 1991 to 2020, the official NWS normal period for the image on the top left, then 1895 to 2000 for the image on the top right, not the area of below normal is significantly less. That is because the period 1991 to 2020 was warmer than the 1895 to 2000 period. On the bottom left the mean is 1895 to 2020, that has no below normal areas. This seems questionable to me since the ranked normal’s on the next slide look a lot like the 1895 to 2000 on slide 8. I added this because I was getting some questions on this matter. I hope this helps.

Here is my forecast for this coming week, plus a look at the current fall foliage report. The short story is warm and dry this week of the Great Lakes and northern New England. Wet along most of the East Coast and over the western CONUS. It will be cool and wet over the western CONUS.

I am expecting warm and dry weather this week over Michigan but warm and wet over the east coat, and cool and wet over the west coast.

Fall Foliage Map

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.