How hot will it get this summer? Your guess is as good as mine

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With Memorial Day weekend kicking off “cultural summer” and June 1 starting “meteorological summer,” it’s time to contemplate our hottest season, even though it’s still three weeks until it starts on your wall calendar.

· How well can you predict how hot it will get this summer in Southwest and Southside Virginia? See how to enter the second Cardinal Weather heat prediction contest at end of this column.

Last summer produced many headlines for extreme heat. It was the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest summer in 2,000 years, European scientists found. It was the hottest globally since at least 1880, according to NASA. Searing heat waves set records in parts of the South and Southwest U.S. and numerous other nations around the world.

This past summer was the hottest on record in Louisiana and among the top few warmest across much of the South as well parts of West and Northeast. However, the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic regions, including Virginia, had a cool to middling summer for temperatures, relative to normal.

Projections for the summer ahead are that it could rival or exceed last summer for heat in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. An extreme heat-dome high pressure system has already brought record heat to the nations south of the U.S., and that heat dome will likely expand or relocate northward in weeks ahead.

While all this raises plenty of concerns in the big picture of warming global climate and its cascading effects, last summer was rather middling for Virginia. At many sites in the Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area of Cardinal News, 2023 was the coolest summer experienced in the past 6 to 20 years.

A metal roof was blown against a bank building on Colorado Street in Salem, near the path of a EF-1 tornado on Sunday. Photo by Dutchie M. Jessee.

Salem tornado

Salem suffered an EF-1 tornado and severe thunderstorm winds knocked power out for many thousands in Virginia. See coverage from earlier this week.

That’s not to say it was a “cool” summer — average temperatures for the season were warmer than most of those recorded in the 20^th century. We did experience secondary effects of extremely hot, dry weather elsewhere in the form of abnormally thick wildfire smoke from Canada last June — something we may need to watch again, though fires haven’t been nearly as prolific in eastern Canada as they were a year ago.

This week’s weather pattern, which may indeed be a template for most of the first half of June, offers a clue on how it is possible that so many places could have extreme heat, yet our state and region can get a pass (at least temporarily).

Hot high pressure is spreading into North America, but it’s spreading over the western half of the nation.

That puts the eastern half of the nation in cooler northwest flow, as the western high rotates clockwise and a low-pressure trough sets up near the Great Lakes, buckling the jet stream farther south with cooler air from the north. It may pool more in the Ohio Valley, but also might extend into the Appalachians and Mid-Atlantic with below normal to near-normal temperatures.

Heat is expected to be consolidated over the West in early June, with cooler than normal temperatures in the Ohio Valley and near normal in much of Virginia. Courtesy of Climate Prediction Center, NOAA.

This is generally the pattern snow fans have wanted in winter the last two years but only briefly seen. Entering June, it will result in some cool nights in the 40s and highs mostly below average in the 60s and 70s. The farther removed from the last cold frontal passage we are, the more likely there is to be a few 80s, which could happen on Friday. But new fronts will be pushed southeast to quell the heat before it gets too carried away.

There is nothing that would indicate the likelihood of extreme or prolonged heat, or even above normal temperatures beyond a day or two, in our region for the next 10 days at least. This pattern won’t necessarily stick for the summer or recur often, but summer patterns do tend to stagnate. So the more we see of a particular one deeper into June and July often makes it more likely that it could become our default pattern, and we might not have a very hot summer.

All that said, we’ve already discussed in this space five weeks ago that summers in the transition between El Niño and La Niña — the warm and cool extremes of equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures, respectively — have a historic tendency to produce some of our region’s most extreme heat, though usually short-lived.

Red areas show hot sea surface temperatures relative to long-term normal while blue shows cooler temperatures. Of particular note is the deep red in the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean and much of the Atlantic, as well as the strip of cool water from the western coast of South America extending westward north of the equator that signals the start of La Niña. Courtesy of NOAA.

And, considering the record heat of the world’s oceans collectively, especially the Atlantic Ocean, and the ongoing 11-month streak of record global average temperatures, is it just a matter of time till it catches up with us and we have the kind of searing hot period with many triple-digit temperatures we haven’t really had since 2012?

I have some thoughts I’ll share in the next few weeks during what should be a pleasant stretch of weather to start “meteorological summer” in early June. But for now, I’ll let you guess first.

The sun shines through high cirrus clouds over southwest Roanoke County earlier this month. Courtesy of Christine Saunders.

Second Cardinal Weather heat prediction contest

This contest is really not about how hot the summer will be as a whole, but about how high the temperature will be at its hottest. A cooler summer can have an extremely hot spike, while an overall hot summer can have steady 90s with no upper 90s or 100s.

Here are the directions; please follow carefully.

Email weather@cardinalnews.org with your name, where you live (city, town or county), and your pick for the hottest temperatures recorded between June 15 and Aug. 31 at TWO LOCATIONS of your choice from the 16 official weather stations spread across our region listed below. It’s OK for couples or families to put more than one entry on an email — and no age limit.

Whoever is closest considering total degrees missed on the two picks gets a $25 gift card and bragging rights in this space for their summer forecasting prowess. I’ll take entries through Friday, June 14, at midnight. I will only be giving out one gift card, so the tiebreaker if two entries are equally close will be whose entry I received first.

The list of locations from which you can pick includes what the historic range for coolest to hottest peak summer temperatures have been going back through decades of weather records (varying from 20 to 130 years). This is intended as a guide, not a strictly limiting parameter — it’s possible the warmest temperature between June 15 and August 31 at any given site could end slightly above or below these ranges. This is merely what the range has been in the past for the hottest day of the summer.

In addition to a spread of towns and cities across Southwest and Southside Virginia, we’ve included what are often the coolest and hottest spots in our region, respectively: Burke’s Garden in Tazewell County and the John H. Kerr Dam in Mecklenburg County.

So pick two sites below, email me the guesses, and let’s see how much of a hot shot summer weather guesser you are.

· Abingdon: 87 to 100

· Appomattox: 90 to 103

· Blacksburg: 86 to 100

· Burke’s Garden: 82 to 97

· Clintwood: 86 to 97

· Covington: 91 to 102

· Danville: 92 to 107

· Galax: 86 to 97

· John H. Kerr Dam: 93 to 108

· Lexington: 89 to 105

· Lynchburg: 91 to 106

· Martinsville: 90 to 105

· Roanoke: 90 to 105

· South Boston: 92 to 104

· Wise: 82 to 95

· Wytheville: 85 to 98

The last week's weather wasn't all about thunderstorm winds and a tornado. Thursday brought some flooding in areas near the North Carolina border, such as western Grayson County, as seen in this photo of torrents of flowing water. Courtesy Grayson County Sheriff's Office via Facebook. — Last week’s weather wasn’t all about thunderstorm winds and a tornado. Thursday brought some flooding in areas near the North Carolina border, such as western Grayson County, as seen in this photo of torrents of flowing water. Courtesy Grayson County Sheriff’s Office via Facebook.

Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.