Good Friday, everyone. We have a couple of cold fronts set to impact our weather over the next few days and that’s leading to some changes for the weekend. Some of the changes are for the good… some for the not so good. Let’s get into it and break it all down.
Today’s cold front will have some isolated showers and storms along and ahead of it. Highs today will hit the upper 70s and low 80s with another taste of muggy air.
The air behind this front is cooler and less humid and will set the stage for a fairly nice Saturday. Highs will be in the mid and upper 70s with a partly sunny sky. There is still a small threat for a shower.
The changes begin to work int here by later Saturday as another system works toward the state. This will bring an increase in showers and thunderstorms by Sunday evening…
The shower and storm risk will carry us into Monday.
Another system may be right behind it for the middle of the week…
The setup continues to suggest rounds of showers and thunderstorms working around the northern and eastern edge of the core of heat across the southwestern part of the country. The two week rainfall forecast from the GFS shows the pattern well…
Have a great Friday and take care.
As of yesterday, Lexington has recorded 22.38 inches of precipitation for the year. Normal value is 20.33. Last year had 16.25.
I was looking at the stats for last year and last June was a very odd month! Even though we had 3 days with highs over 100, the average temperature actually ended up below normal for the month. That was due to an extremely cool first half of the month. There was a day with a high in the 60’s and two days with lows in the 40’s.
July was a different story though.
Ok–July was odd too. We had the second warmest July ever (only behind 1936) but the ninth rainiest with over 8 inches of rain. It appears the drought really stretched from Mid-June to Mid-July–and in that stretch temps were in the 95-105 range for highs for a three week period. August, like June, was below normal.
I remember last summer as hot and dry and I’m about 20 miles from Lexington. Funny how the stats don’t match what I experienced. Our yard was brown, our fields were brown, and we didn’t have to mow for about six weeks.
I don’t remember anything being cooler either. Where was I last summer?? 🙂
The heart of the drought stretched from February though July but still hung around and then reintensified some in the fall before completely ending in December and January. Of course it was much more severe in western Ky while the eastern mountains missed out on most of it. July did bring a lot of relief but not nearly as much as the gage at LEX sugggests. The July numbers were skewed by a couple pop up storms that dumped a lot of rain on western Fayette Co.
Last spring and summer was very hot but we did have nice reprieve in early June. What was odd was to have cool weather in June and it be accompanied by almost no rainfall.
Thanks for that info, Packman. Now I do remember being very mad that Lex got a lot of rain that missed us.
We DID get the Derecho and our house was hit by lightning in a July storm that had an insane number of lightning bolts. We lost our DVR, attic fans, landline phone, and fridge…but our house didn’t burn down! I don’t think it rained much either. 🙁
I remember watching that derecho on radar and seeing the separate gust front being well painted. Looked it up, it was June 29-30 2012.
IIRC, it was triple-digit temps with high humidity which further fueled the storms.
I had never seen severe t-storm warnings issued for areas where there was destructive (and in once case in KY deadly) straight-line winds but little or no rain!
A friend of mine was visiting her sister in Ohio when the Derecho hit that town. It destroyed the entire area as if a tornado had hit. They were without power for almost a full month and many structures were torn apart, along with thousands of trees.
Yes, and that reprieve went all through autumn. After a record warm spring, and a top ten warmest winter in 2012, we nearly had a top ten coolest autumn, followed by another warm winter.
On the whole, 2012 went down as the 1st or 2nd warmest year in Kentucky (depending on location). And as Pacman pointed out, the drought was much worse in Western Ky. On June 1st, Paducah received more rainfall in one day than they did all of last summer!
Yay for a pretty weekend! Even though I have to work tomorrow, a pretty Saturday with longer days makes it not so bad. Still have a lot of daylight to enjoy when I get off. No drought for us, it looks like.
Everybody have a wonderful Friday!!!! thanks, Chris, for all you do!
Guess I should have read the other comments before posting mine. These guys all sound so intelligent, and here I am blabbering about a pretty weekend. I DO remember last June and July though, and how strange our weather was for the whole year last year. Just makes me wonder if strange is the new norm? What say you, fellow weather weenies? 🙂
My guess is that people over a century ago thought our wx was becoming strange. The winter of 1889-90 likely would have fueled this perception in our area, as ridiculously warm as it was (and with the many tornadoes it spawned including a January F4 in western KY and the infamous Louisville twister of March 27 1890)
Anyway, it will probably a very pretty weekend …. in southern California 😛 See, you were right all along 😉
Thanks, Mark! I really feel like the weather goes through cycles. Hopefully we are on the downhill side of the present one.
Another dry day for Central KY? I see the radar lighting up to the Southwest but it looks to miss this area again. I do not want to see a repeat of last years’ June 15-July 15 period. It was devastating for agricultural interests in his area.
I don’t like the pattern that has set up with system after system underperforming. Let’s hope that next week’s northwest flow brings us a couple storm complexes. Until then , it’s time to bust out the sprinklers before the lawn turns completely brown.
Did you see on weather dot com that a met made a list of safest US weather cities ( 8 total ) and out of those 8, Lexington made it in the list, but was the “weakest” safe weather city. Some of the cities on the list I agree with, but I can think of other cities that didn’t make it that would be MUCH safer.
http://www.weather.com/news/safest-weather-cities-20120808
Yea, Chris commented (link here) on this weather dot com article when it came out.
Unlike Nashville and Louisville, in some ways Lexington seems to have had some lucky dice rolls regarding twisters, at least to date. However, during the Super Outbreak of 1974, central KY was almost literally raked with violent tornadoes including two devastating F4s close to Lexington at both Frankfort and Richmond. Chris mentioned Lexington’s 2004 F3 tornado.
Perhaps Lexington’s higher elevation relative to Louisville make for somewhat more comfortable summers. And Lexington is far enough south that any snow cover is usually short-lived.
Still, I’m also a bit surprised that Lexington was included in the ranking.
Ohhh! That was back in August when that article was written? I missed that. I just saw on weather.com on the main page today. I guess they rehashed it.
At any rate, I can just think of so many city climates in the US that are more tranquil……that’s why it surprised me. I disagree with ANY city in Maine too! Maine has AWFUL weather.
Hopefully Chris can shed some light on the central KY dry spell, strange how the rain is dying out before it reaches central KY, it must be the summer dome?
Our big rain forecasts are suddenly getting like our big snow forecasts. Unexpected. A lot of misses in a row since last week. Short trend or more to miss? We went from heavy torrential rains for yesterday and today to nothing. Trippy.