Today, Monday July 20, is the mid-point of summer – temperature wise. Our average high/low temperature is 83/62 and that’s as high as those numbers get. We’re having a warm summer – so far, we’ve already had thirteen 90-degree days and the warmer-than-average trend will continue – pretty much right through the end of the warm season.
Here’s the latest 8-14 Day Outlook from the Climate Prediction Center. They are expecting warmer-than-average temperatures for the end of July into early August. Alaska is expected to be cooler-than-average. Speaking of Alaska…
This is a picture from the Utqiaġvik (Barrow) webcam from Sunday. Utqiaġvik is the northernmost town in the U.S. – north of the Arctic Circle where the sun is up 24 hours a day during the month of July. The high temperature there Sunday was just 40 and the low temperature was 33. When I checked, the wind was NE at 13 and the wind chill factor was 27. You can see that most of the Arctic Ocean is open water with floating chunks (bergs) of ice. If you don’t like summer heat, this is the place to be. The average high temperature here in mid-July is 47 and it’s never been 80 degrees.
Here’s North American snow and ice cover. There is still about a 40% ice cover on Hudson Bay and it’ll likely be until August before it’s gone. The ice has come off of Great Bear Lake and snow cover is limited to the highest mountains.
Rainfall is expected to be near average in Michigan from July 27-August 2 with rainfall coming from passing thunderstorms that will typically move from west to east or northwest to southeast.
An Elementary School in Cheboygan was heavily damaged by strong thunderstorm winds over the weekend. This is the Bishop Baraga Catholic School. The National Weather Service has determined this was likely a microburst. There is no debris scattered about like a tornado would do…it looks like the roof was just pushed into the school. I drove a couple blocks past that school Saturday PM. The storm hit at 5:20 am – fortunately a time when the school was unoccupied.
Here’s storm reports from Sunday…just one tornado, in NE Colorado. There were 259 wind damage reports, including gusts of 86 mph in Jasper Co. IN – 83 mph near East Tawas MI, 64 mph at the Battle Creek Airport and 60 mph at Covert in Berrien County.
Just about everyone in Michigan saw rain from this system. Freeport had 1.25″. I had 0.47″ at my house – less than half of what fell at the airport. Most areas had wind gusts of 35-55 mph with the storms that came through.
Also: Nice shelf cloud in Colorado. A “lightning explosion“. Remembering Hurricane Danny.
