A Hot Holiday Weekend, But Parts Of Minnesota Could See Storms On The Fourth
SPEAKERS
Jim du Bois, Kenny Blumenfeld
Jim du Bois 00:00
Hey folks, it's not 1988. This is Way Over Our Heads. It's a weather and climate podcast. I'm Jim du Bois. Kenny Blumenfeld's a climatologist Kenny. The heat's back on, right?
Kenny Blumenfeld 00:15
Yeah. Oh, you could queue up some Guns and Roses or some DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince and it'll feel just like 1988.
Jim du Bois 00:28
That's right.
Kenny Blumenfeld 00:29
Yeah, the heat’s back on. Well, first, Jim, how are you?
Jim du Bois 00:34
Kenny, I'm doing well. I am, as you know, enjoying the hot weather. I just wish it were a little less dry. So I'm spending a lot of time watering the garden, watering the lawn, so rain would be most welcome.
Kenny Blumenfeld 00:51
Yeah, it would be nice. It's, you know, the grasses are really brown. And I think, I think I've stumbled onto why people, because I, you know, my job, Jim, I've done a lot of interviews. And I don't mind. You know, I love talking with media and talking to people about, about how the, how the weather and climate are shaping up. But it's such a pervasive comparison. Oh, how much is this, like 1988? So I guess for the listeners benefit, I'll say it's Friday, July 2, 2021. It's been very dry. It's been very warm. And we have official drought designations across the vast majority of Minnesota. Over 80% of the state, I believe, is in moderate drought at this point. And we have about a little over 10% is designated as severe drought. So, as you get into this kind of situation, people want to make comparisons to other big events. And the most recent, really big drought was in 1988. And I think I understand why people want to make the comparison. And tell me if you think this is right, Jim. You notice, so here's my theory, because just to kind of spoil it for everybody, 1988 was massive, and much more severe than where we are so far, much more widespread. And the impacts were enormous. I mean, this was a an utter disaster through and through. But I think what the typical person remembers from it is the brown grass. You know, that's kind of the first thing you notice about really dry, you know that the grass is brown is that you remember the brown grass?
Jim du Bois 02:42
I do remember the brown grass. Yeah, I would say that would be probably what sticks in my mind the most because at that time, I was not a homeowner yet. So I was not worried about lawns and didn't have a garden. So really, that's about it, just remembering all the brown grass around.
Kenny Blumenfeld 03:01
Yeah. And so what's interesting is when you have, I mean, this drought, the one we're in now has been pretty well behaved. It's not a sudden drought. It's been ramping up to this for almost a year and a half, two years in some places. But we're kind of at the early stages, or, you know, we, the drought might end, too. But I mean, we said if this is going to really ramp up, then then we're kind of at the early stages, but one of the first things to show signs of stress is grass. Because, you know, there's just not enough moisture in the soil. The persistent evaporation from having sunny days and warm conditions, and you just lose that moisture. And so, some of the some of the plants, especially grasses, kind of show the signs, first, though, it's kind of iconic imagery, because it's something that everyone can relate to. Almost all property owners have grass on their property. And so they, you know, either have to water it more or you know, like a lot of us do, just forget about it. And you know, wait till it rains, basically. And so you see the yellows and the browns, but 1988 had much, much more than yellow and brown grasses. I mean, there was very little water left in some of the aquifers. It was just dry, dry, dry. And I think that if you look at some of the numbers, you know, with the exception of where you live and where I used to live, Jim and kind of south Minneapolis and basically the center, the urban core of the Twin Cities area. With the exception of the urban and suburban core of the Twin Cities area, 1988 was the second year of a two-year drought and 1987 had been very hot and very dry across the entire state. And the reason I except the Twin City, you know say except the Twin Cities area is because we had that superstorm right in the middle of 1987, in July of 1987, that dumped, you know, a foot of rainfall over over parts of the Twin Cities. And that kind of, you know, added a lot of water back into the system in a very localized area, but the rest of the state stayed really dry. And I looked at some different stations and just kind of comparing, alright, what's the difference in, you know, kind of 18 months precipitation, that between, you know, what we have now, so going from January of 2020, through the end of June this year. How does that compare with where we were in 1988, when we looked at, if we looked at the 18 months, precipitation? And it's kind of, I wouldn't say night and day, but the precipitation deficits in 1988, were much, much larger. So, just as an example, looking at the Twin Cities area, the 18 month, precipitation isn't really all that bad at all. We're at basically 12 inches or so this year. And we're close to 30 inches last year. So there's really only a few inches of of deficit versus 1988 when we were in a much more dire position, we only received about six inches of precipitation through June at this time. And even with the big superstorm in 1987, it was still generally a dry year. And other towns that didn't have that superstorm in 1987, like out in western Minnesota, Jim, they only had between the two years, only about 25 to 30 inches of precipitation, and are already kind of at that point this year. So, it's it's just you can't really make the comparison. There were more hot days in 1987 than there was in 2020, and more hot days in 1988 than there have been in 2020. In fact, as hot as this year has been here in the Twin Cities, it's been hot. I mean, I'm not Pooh poohing that this has been a hot summer. And we have had, what have we had 12 days with temperatures at or above 90 degrees. By this time in 1988, we were already at 17. I mean, it's a substantial gap. Yeah. And July really, really, really picked it up. I mean that the number of oh gosh, what was it in July of 1988 in the Twin Cities, and the Twin Cities is just one example, you actually see more dramatic numbers in western Minnesota in July of 1988, we had 17 days in the Twin Cities that were at or above 90 degrees. So, by the end of July, we already had 34...34 90 degree days down and we were still going. August, you know, we picked up another 10. So, in western Minnesota, there were communities that had over 50 days where the temperature was 90 or higher. And I think in Madison, Minnesota was 60 days. So we're not, we're really not the same level of heat, not the same level of precipitation deficit. The best analogy I can come up with Jim is, you know, we were blindfolded. Now, we don't know where we're going with this. You never know the final outcome when you're in drought, because this could continue through the summer. And then by that point, if it's still been really dry, and really hot, then I think the comparisons to 1988 will be more appropriate because there will be some severe consequences. But we could also have what happened in 2007. Or, or in other years where the spigot kind of turns on and we start getting a lot of rain. But as long as we're blindfolded, making the comparison between now and 1988 is kind of like if you were climbing a random mountain blindfolded, you didn't know which one it was, and you got up a couple thousand feet and concluded that you were on Mount Everest. You can't. You can't really, I mean, I don't know if that works for you, but right now, we're kind of at the level if we keep the mountain analogy with our drought, we're kind of, we're somewhere in the Appalachians, right? And 1988 is a Himalayan drought. It's enormous. And so assuming that we're gonna end up at those same heights is a little bit premature at this point. So, that's what I have to say about 1988. But I mean, you know, we're in a pretty precarious position right now, for sure.
Jim du Bois 09:50
Well, speaking of precarious positions, parts of the western part of the United States and Canada had some record breaking temperatures over the last several days. I mean, you talk about the blowtorch on, there was a town, wasn't an in British Columbia? I can't remember the name of the town but that was an all-time record.
Kenny Blumenfeld 10:12
Portland, Oregon hit 116 degrees. I think there was a town, and there were some 120 degree readings. We're talking Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. That is, yeah, blowtorch. And you, you kind of, you're such a professional Jim, you say like, oh, they broke some records, yeah they obliterated records. Yeah. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen and other folks. Jim du Bois is being a professional broadcaster. He doesn't want to, you know, blow things out of proportion. But the thing is, this heatwave blew itself out of proportion. I mean, you know, there were anecdotes, I don't know if you've read these from forecasters, professional forecasters, including those at the National Weather Service, who said, you know, when we saw this thing showing up on some of the weather models, we had to go back to the models assuming that they were tripped out on something and that they were, that there was something wrong with them, because the values were so anomalous, coming out of the forecast models, that the forecasters had to assume that they had made mistakes. And it was only until the heatwave got closer, and you started seeing confirmation on some of the weather charts that, oh, my gosh, this is an enormous, you know, I know, it's popular to call it a heat dome. But this is basically an enormous ridge of high pressure and high pressure heights that yeah, I guess it is kind of dome shaped that actually would be capable of producing extraordinary heat. I mean, we're talking about places that, you know, it's not like Portland doesn't ever get hot. I mean, they had previously had an all time record high temperature of 107 degrees, which is no joke. I mean, they can, this area can get hot, because it's relatively arid, and if the correct airmass is in place, but they had never gotten hot like this, they broke their records by nine degrees. And that's an all time record. In Portland, Oregon isn't a brand new city. I mean, it's been around for a while and has a long, long recorded weather history. So, that would be like, put it into Minnesota terms, the highest temperature ever recorded in Minneapolis was 108 degrees back in July of 1936. So, that would be like if we clocked in at 117. Yeah, right. Oh, and the record high temperature in Minnesota, depending on exactly, it's you know, 114 degrees in Beardsley, Minnesota. There's another older record from Moorhead, Minnesota, but Beardsley clocks in at 114 degrees. So, just imagine now we've got a heat wave where it's, you know, they're coming in at 123. Unreal, yeah. So that, yeah. And you know, and we, you know, in, in this business, even when you're not talking about climate change, you kind of never say never, because the truth is that, if the conditions are right, you can get whatever the maximum potential of those conditions is. So, you can get tornadoes in Alaska, you can get snow falling in Hawaii, if the conditions are right. You can get extraordinary 120 degree heat, presumably even in Minnesota, if the conditions are right, but we have never recorded that. And they had never recorded anything like this in Oregon, Washington, parts of northern California, western Idaho, and of course, southern Canada. Nobody thinks of, you know, Canada as a place where the cables melt. I mean, that's what's happening. And of course, these these locations also aren't really set up to deal with extreme heat because it even though it does happen, it's so rare. So you know, you have more air conditioning in Minnesota than you have in those areas.
Jim du Bois 14:13
Right.
Kenny Blumenfeld 14:14
Yeah, it's just real hard to cope with that kind of heat.
Jim du Bois 14:18
Well, we just wrapped up the month of June and correct me if I'm wrong, Kenny but wasn't this past month the second warmest on record for the Twin Cities?
Kenny Blumenfeld 14:29
Yeah, yeah, it was. The Twin Cities has a pretty long record too. We can push that back into the 1870s. So, the second warmest in the Twin Cities. It looks like it's the warmest on record in Duluth. Most of the major weather stations in Minnesota, so that's, you know, St. Cloud, Rochester, the Twin Cities and Duluth, were all top five for June warmth. International Falls was a little lower down, and then as we look into some of the other non, not the primary stations, we see that basically from the Iron Range up to the north central part of the state up around the Canadian border, it wasn't quite as exceptionally warm. But you know, I think once the final numbers are in for the state, this will be the second or third warmest June on record. Once all that's been kind of spatially averaged. Very warm June, no surprise, we were dry, only tiny slivers of the state, you know, constituting single-digit percentages of the state actually had above normal precipitation. And these would be areas that got under the favorable location for some of those heavy thunderstorms that we had only a few times during the entire month of June. But if he ended up under one of them, especially the ones that were kind of stationary, we had some a few days ago, and then, you know, a few different times earlier in the month, that's basically what you're seeing. Nobody, really, there weren't any large areas that got too much rain, it was just the very small areas benefited from from being under the big thunderstorms for you know, we didn't have any real flooding. There was no infrastructural damage from these. The other 90 some percent of the state came up really short for precipitation. So, summarizing June, it was very warm, and it was very dry. Most locations in the state came out with about half the precipitation they would normally get. That's not good. I mean, that's why you got brown grasses. And you know, with this kind of sunlight this strong this time of year, plus clear skies, that's kind of a recipe for losing more moisture out of your soil. We're, we haven't seen the thing where the lakes are now receding from the shore. We haven't seen that yet. That's another 1988 special, where, you know, you look at the old photographs and docks are just connecting the shore to more sand. We don't have that yet. We're not at that point. But we have now seen, you know, in some of the like wildlife management areas and some of the little wetlands where you've got little ponds and kind of marshy potholey areas, we have started to see some of those drying up. So, small bodies of water that aren't particularly deep, that, you know, sit out in parts of western Minnesota, central Minnesota, we have seen some of those showing signs of drying up. So, until we start getting more precipitation we'll see more of that.
Jim du Bois 17:31
Well, Kenny, we're recording this on Friday, July 2. We're going into a long, for a lot of folks, Fourth of July weekend. It looks like it's gonna be hot over the next several days. A cold front is coming in. So, any relief in sight, perhaps Sunday, Sunday night into Monday morning?
Kenny Blumenfeld 17:53
Well, you know, so there's a there's an adage in forecasting that when you're when you're in drought, go dry. So, if you're in a drought situation and you see, you know, you see chances for precipitation coming, expect to be underwhelmed. We do on Sunday have a cold front coming through the region and I mean, if you believe the weather models anyway, it's gonna disrupt some Fourth of July's. I don't know, if I share the confidence that a lot of the public forecasters have that oh, this is going to be very small. There are folks in Minnesota who are going to be out on the Fourth of July, and it's going to be great, and they have nothing to worry about. But I'd say there are chances of some parts of central Minnesota, possibly near the Twin Cities having storms, thunderstorms, right around fireworks time. And you know, not even because of shortages, not everyone is doing fireworks. I think it would be kind of, I guess ironic, that you know, in a year where we're begging for rain and can't get it the one time we do would be when nobody wants it to rain because they want to, you know, be outside celebrating with their friends and families. I don't think it's gonna be a washout at all. But I think there will be some isolated thunderstorms on Sunday on and off different parts of Minnesota on Sunday and possibly in central Minnesota Sunday evening. I don't think that is going to constitute widespread relief. I think anybody who gets hit by a shower or thunderstorm is quite lucky. Maybe they'll get up to a half an inch or an inch if it's really if they really get under the core. But yeah, then allegedly, it's going to cool down. And so we have a hot weekend, you know really hot Saturday and Sunday. The only thing that might prevent it from getting out of hand for temperatures is that there've been a lot of fires up in Canada, and even though our winds at the surface where we all breathe and live are going to be coming out of the southwest, the winds aloft, go a few 1000 feet up, those winds are going to become and they're going to turn on Saturday, and they're going to start coming out of the west northwest, and there could be some of that smoke drifting in. And it might be thick enough by the time we get into Sunday, especially to filter some of that sunlight out and knock us back down a couple of degrees, which is good. It would actually be welcome because Jim, parts of Minnesota if they don't get smoke-filtered sunshine, if that smoke doesn't end up filtering, or they don't get some clouds, some of the charts show that show areas of central and western Minnesota going over 100 degrees this weekend, both days. And so even mid-90s here in central and southern Minnesota. And it would be okay, I think by most people, if you're knocked a couple or a few degrees off of that,
Jim du Bois 20:58
Right. Absolutely.
Kenny Blumenfeld 20:59
I you know, yeah. So, it looks like a hot, Saturday, Sunday, Monday is becoming increasingly iffy. It has generally been looking like another hot day, but there's going to be this front coming through on Sunday. And depending on how far south of Minnesota that front gets, we might not be quite as warm on Monday as it had looked like. But temperatures will probably be in the 80s or 90s on Monday. And then things start to kind of cool down, cool in quotes, as we drop into the 80s mostly for high temperatures for the majority of the week. There have been signs of some actually legitimately cool conditions setting up as high pressure from Hudson Bay kind of possibly drifts over our region later in the coming week. But there still aren't any signs of really widespread heavy precipitation. There have been some signs that parts of southern Minnesota, generally south of the Twin Cities, could be quite wet on on Tuesday, and that would be welcome. I mean, we'll take anything, Jim, we'll take anything even if not everyone gets in on it, it'll be great to see some folks are doing better than then we've been doing. But we don't see yet any signs of a widespread, you know, one to two inch rainfall where, you know, where dozens of counties get in on the action. I think if we see one of those, we'll probably have to do a special recording.
Jim du Bois 22:23
Okay.
Kenny Blumenfeld 22:25
Something so, something what's typically so mundane, as, you know, a low pressure system, producing some steady, steady, widespread rains. I think that would be almost breaking news if we could get that. And of course, it wouldn't take us out of drought, but it would certainly not hurt.
Jim du Bois 22:42
Well, enjoy Kenny this nice long weekend ahead. Be aware of the high temperatures. Make sure you hydrate well. Make sure if you feel any signs that your body is succumbing to the heat that you take appropriate actions. And I guess Happy Fourth of July to everyone.
Kenny Blumenfeld 23:00
Yeah, Happy Independence Day. Drink that water. Also, be aware of thunderstorms, especially out on boats and whatnot Sunday. Lightning's a killer, so stay out of the way of those storms and enjoy the weekend.
Jim du Bois 23:13
All right.
Kenny Blumenfeld 23:15
Good talking with you, Jim.
Jim du Bois 23:16
Kenny, good talking to you as always. This is Way Over Our Heads. It's a weather and climate podcast. I'm Jim du Bois. Kenny Blumenfeld's a climatologist. We'll see you next time.