Good morning…have a feeling this will be the last blog for a couple of days as the weather is about to go into vacation mode..as are so many others out there who are going to try and take some days off before school re-starts in a couple of more weeks. We’ve enjoyed below average highs for 5 days in a row…and we’re going to add a few more to that before the more typical summer regime builds back into the region.
A reminder that Mars will be closest to the earth Tuesday night…some 35.7 million miles away. Hopefully sky conditions cooperate. It will be the brighter, sort of reddish, planet shining brightly towards the right of the moon.
Mars is about half the size of the earth…it will be at it’s highest point in the southern sky towards midnight…and I believe it will be to the right of the almost full moon. There are some hoax #fakeplanet pics running around showing this to be a tremendously large (moon size) object in the sky…it won’t be and don’t fall for the stupidity. It will be like a bright star…a pinch bigger perhaps.
The next close visit of Mars (not as close as Tuesday night) will be in October of 2020…it will be about 3 million miles farther away from earth than Tuesday night.
Oh and IF you have a telescope it will look better but still not great. You may have heard about all the dust storms circulating around the planet…well that has obscured the surface features tremendously.
This is how a few of the planets line up tomorrow night…via theskylive.com
Another way of viewing things is how the night sky will look tomorrow night…try this link.
Onwards…
Did you know that since 1/1/2017(!) St Joseph is running more than 20″ below average for moisture. Remember how wet last summer was in the KC area? Well they missed a lot of the heavy flooding rains that we received here last summer.
In KC…July is actually going to go down as a wetter than average month. We’re almost an inch above average…and there may be some spotty storms later today (Monday) in the region as well.
The overwhelming signal though in the model data, as I’ve talked about for the last few days…is a pronounced warming trend that will take us back to and then back above average. The coolest will be Tuesday morning (50s) the hottest will probably be over the weekend (mid 90s possible).
The model trends are clear and have been for quite some time regarding this…
So obviously it will get hotter again…
It will also get very dry again. aside from whatever may happen later Monday (today)…I don’t see much to give us moisture for days to come…that means IF you didn’t get enough over the weekend, many did not, then the drought situation will be worsening over the coming 10+ days it appears
So our run of “nice” weather for the last week will be coming to an end (from a temperature standpoint, in a few more days.
The last seven days have averaged well below normal across a huge portion of the Northern Plains and Grain Belt. Many areas of Iowa, the Dakotas and Eastern Nebraska averaged more than 4 F below normal during this time. #agwx pic.twitter.com/urGWzMogRz
— John Homenuk (@jhomenuk) July 30, 2018
Our feature photo comes from Charley Caron down towards Garnett, KS…he did well with the rain yesterday.
See you again in a few days!
Joe