Sunday, July 1, 2018

Hello Summer :)

The month of June has retired for 2018 and now summer is really here. Over the course of the next 75 days we shall enjoy the finest weather mother earth has to offer. We earn it every year.

Miss Spring was her typical self this June with some tears, hot flashes, and temper tantrums. Glad that's over, let the summer commence!

June was pretty typical actually with a near dead on average temps over the course of the month. I had an average daily low at 52.45° just a tiny tick above "normal" and the Highs came in at 72.43° also a tick above. Although normal is a collection of extremes as Pat Timm has always pointed out in his weather columns, we didn't have too many "extremes" last month.

The warmest day was the 24th when I read 87.6° one of only three days above 85° all month. The warmest overnight low came in on the 20th with a 61.9° and nearly matched again the next night. The chilliest temp came on the 12th with a 42.1° mark and there was one day that failed to reach 60° and that was the 10th with a very march like 55°.

June gave us 15 days that were mostly sunny and 8 days with some rain. I had several days with thunderstorms including a few short but heavy downpours. We got 4 days above 80° and 17 days above 70°.

Despite some serious downpours, all but one of them were too short to really do much to the rain gauge. The wettest day was the 9th with 0.55 inches and that was the only day above 0.25 inches. Despite the 8 "rainy" days I only managed to collect 1.37 inches of rain and that is another sub-par month. Just 13.99 inches in the bucket at the halfway point and that's a touch under HALF my rolling average.

We are in for a dangerous fire season so please be careful out there. We are about to enter the start of a 60 day period where it is not at all uncommon to have ZERO precipitation. I average about an inch of rain in each of the two summer months, but I have also recorded several July months and August months with no rain at all.

I wouldn't mind having a couple of days in both July and August with a quarter inch or more in the bucket, just to keep things greenish.

So there you have it, the start of the greatest summer on Earth so you drop the top, don the shorts and tanks, and go soak it up my friends, soak it up.