The title of the blog may have you perplexed…..halftime is a football term, which of course is a sport played in the fall but it’s summer! Truth, it is indeed summer but today–July 16th–marks the halfway point of Meteorological Summer (June 1st-August 31st)! Here is where we stand with the first half stats!
Essentially, New England is having a warm & dry summer so far. The first half of July has been particularly warm..
June was a smidge below normal…
In terms of precipitation….dry. Here is June..
And here is July (so far)…
Great for vacationers but not so much for lawns & gardens. Where do we go from here? Well, we know that an El Nino is beginning to develop and while they grab all the headlines during the winter months they also affect global weather patterns for spring, summer and fall. In terms of summer, an El Nino typcially tends to mute heat as the summer grows old…..so I would hedge that the hottest part of the summer is behind us. That’s not to say August is sweater weather because it’s not but perhaps fewer 90 degree days and more days with 70s & 80s for high temps. When looking down the road a few weeks you can see a hint of that type of pattern for the United States…
Notice the lack of extreme heat for much of the nation (some warmth here in the Northeast but much of heat is out west as well as Texas).
Precipitation can be more of a wild card due to the tropics. Overall, the pattern could remain dry but all it would take would be one or two tropical systems to find their way into New England and our dry spell would be done.
In the short term, After some late afternoon & evening thunderstorms on Tuesday (locally heavy rain the highest risk with the storms), we’ll have some outstanding summer weather for the remainder of the week…
Enjoy the second half of summer!
~JR