Two things are not going to happen in Southwest and Southside Virginia on this last week of summer: 90s temperatures or substantial rain.
Last week of summer, you ask? Well, the last week of meteorological summer, which concludes on Sunday, the last day of August. Meteorological seasons start and end neatly with months, largely for statistical convenience. But, in a sense, this is the last week of summer culturally also, with a full slate of high school and college football games rolling into the Labor Day weekend. Memorial Day to Labor Day is, in essence, our summer culturally, and very close to the June 1-Aug. 31 meteorological definition of summer.
Astronomical summer lingers on the calendar until the autumnal equinox on Sept. 22. The first three weeks of September often feel like something of a summer twilight, not quite summer, not quite autumn.
But the lack of heat and rain as a cool, dry autumn-like airmass has settled in for several days give us a chance to begin taking stock of the summer in our region before it is quite over. That includes the highest temperatures of summer, which all occurred way back in late June, for the heat prediction contest. We’ll get to that below.
Hit and miss downpours
One of the key features of this summer for our region was the propensity for some extreme localized downpours — yet it not being an especially rainy summer, on the whole, across most of the region, however much it may seem in the spots that did get repeated rainfall.
The most recent example of that was on Thursday evening (Aug. 21), when an extraordinary cloudburst unloaded on some western parts of Roanoke.
As it happened this poured right into the official gauge at the Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport, with 3.38 inches in an hour and 4.27 total for the evening. Peters Creek shot up from a half-foot to 7 feet in a few minutes, and water inundated many streets in the busy Peters Creek Road and Valley View Mall areas of Roanoke, leading to several swift-water rescues as motorists became stranded in automobiles.
Apparently this was the record for hourly rainfall at Roanoke at least since the modern era of data from the current airport recording station in 1948, according to Southeast Regional Climate Center director Chip Konrad, who is also a Roanoke Valley native. Konrad noted the unusual nature of this extreme downpour coming from a storm traveling southward with relatively modest precipitable moisture aloft on the outskirts of the peripheral circulation of Hurricane Erin more than 1,000 miles to the east. Konrad notes that half of the top 10 extreme hourly rainfall rates at Roanoke have occured in the last 12 years, which he said he correlates with above normal sea surface temperatures in recent years “due in part to natural climate variability [e.g. Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation] and of course anthropogenic climate change.”
Yet even with that flooding downpour, Roanoke’s summer seasonal rain rose to 13.59 inches, or 36th wettest out of 114 summers — above the median, but a long way from being among the top few rainiest summers.
For the month of August, the total of 6.14 ranks 21st wettest out of 114 Augusts at Roanoke, pretty high but not close to that record 16.71 inches in August 1940 we discussed here a couple weeks ago. It would have been Roanoke’s 26th driest August without the 4-inch deluge.
Meanwhile, an hour east on U.S. 460 at Lynchburg, there has only been 1.17 inches of rain in August, tied for 10th driest out of 133 Augusts on record. Lynchburg’s 11.71 inches for the summer is near the middle of the pack, 68th wettest out of 133.
A similar discrepancy can be seen between Galax and Wytheville, 35 miles apart with a jaunt up Interstate 77.
Galax is one of the places in our region that can actually say this was a really wet summer, with 24.40 inches for the summer. Since the turn of the century, about when Galax’s consistent official records begin, there has been only one summer with more rain, nearly 33 inches in 2013. Galax repeatedly experienced localized flooding this summer, with four days topping 2 inches: 3.67 on Aug. 2, 2.75 on July 19, 2.68 on July 16, and 2.11 on June 27.
But Wytheville missed Galax’s plentiful rain, getting roughly a fourth as much, just 6.40 inches. That made it the fifth driest summer on record at Wytheville in the past 94 years, and the driest since only 6.25 fell in 1987.
Upslope flow onto the Blue Ridge, plus differential heating along the ridge, was likely a major factor in focusing stronger storms on Galax than Wytheville, which often experiences some drying downslope effects west of the Blue Ridge.
The summer’s most serious flooding episodes were likely the Dante cloudburst on July 18 and the southern Halifax County flooding (really the northern edge of widespread central North Carolina flooding) with the remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal on July 7. In each case, 6-10 inches of rain fell in a short time. There was also a heavy burst of rainfall in some parts of the New River Valley on June 27, with Radford collecting 3.4 inches in a couple of hours.
But on the whole, across the region, it was a fairly average summer of rain, even a bit drier than the median at places like Danville (10.21 inches, ranking 69th wettest of 109 summers) and Blacksburg (9.99 inches, ranking 93rd wettest out of 133 years). That may be hard to believe if your particular spot on the map kept getting the afternoon storms in repetition or your area got flooded a time or two.
A sticky summer, not exceptionally hot
Summer heat in terms of temperatures peaked in late June, as all 10 locations in Southwest and Southside Virginia that we used as sites in the summer heat prediction contest recorded their hottest temperatures between June 23 and 26. Only a couple places in Southside — the John H. Kerr Dam and South Boston — reached the century mark.
While temperatures in July never quite recovered to what they were in late June, plenty of upper 80s-mid 90s days with dew points above 70s created extremely sticky conditions. It often “felt” like 100 degrees even if the mercury wasn’t that high. The heat and abundant atmospheric moisture also contributed to the aforementioned localized downpours.
August has broken the mold for the summer, with unseasonably cool bookend weeks to start and finish. We’ll let this week’s 40s-lower 50s low temperatures and 60s-70s high temperatures of this week play out before putting August in historic perspective.
But it does mean we are well past the hottest weather of meteorological summer. September and sometimes even early October can bring back a few days pushing toward 90, and even infrequently a more serious heat wave, but there’s a pretty good chance that most of our region’s locations are done with the 90-degree for the rest of 2025.
I haven’t gotten around to scoring the heat prediction contest, but here are the hottest temperatures for the season at the 10 sites. For those who entered, if you remember your entry, you might get a pretty good idea how you did on the two best of your three picks.
Abingdon: 94, June 25.
Appomattox: 96, June 24.
Blacksburg: 92, June 24, 25 and 26.
Clintwood: 92, June 24.
Danville: 96, June 23 and 24.
John H. Kerr Dam: 102, June 25.
Lynchburg: 96, June 23.
Martinsville: 96, June 23.
Roanoke: 97, June 24 and 25.
Wytheville: 93, June 25.
The John H. Kerr Dam in Mecklenburg County reached 100 or higher on four days in June (24-27) and another day in July (9). Meanwhile, Burke’s Garden in Tazewell County never reached 90, peaking at 87 on June 25.
That’s the long and short of it for summer heat in 2025.
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. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:
