A July weekend afternoon with intermittent rain showers and temperatures stuck in the 60s and 70s can be viewed in two entirely different ways.
For some, it is a ruined pool or lake day. For others, it is a welcome break of cooler air, coupled this time with much-needed rainfall.
Both viewpoints are valid. And both are fleeting.
A few days of showery and, at some times and some places, occasionally downright rainy weather is passing as the recent pattern of moist easterly flow roughly parallel to a stalled front and almost perpendicular with our mountainous terrain breaks down.
That is being replaced by another heat dome high pressure system, centered to our northwest but bulging over us, that will lift temperatures in the Roanoke Valley and areas east of the Blue Ridge into the mid and upper 90s starting on this Wednesday and continuing through at least Friday.
While a location or two scraping 100 degrees can’t be ruled out, this heat wave will have neither quite the intensity nor the lasting power of the one that began July.
This pattern, too, will erode by the weekend into next week, as the hot high weakens and drifts west.
That will introduce a new chance of mostly afternoon showers and storms by the weekend, and perhaps some more rounds of cooler afternoons and showery periods next week.
A pretty good rain for many
The recent rain has proven fairly ample, at least for locations along and west of the Blue Ridge. Several measured 1 to 2 inches from Saturday through Monday, with a few spots that landed in heavy downpours multiple times getting more.
Even east of the Blue Ridge, there were streaks of around an inch or a little more amid a larger area of less.
Added to some other spotty downpours that helped break the early month heat wave near and just after July 4, most locations in our region have had 2 to 4 inches of rain in July, putting them near normal for the entire month or within a good range of getting there by month’s end.
Some locations have had less — Danville hasn’t quite cleared an inch for the month yet at 0.95, Some have had more — Galax is already over 5 inches for July at 5.55.
Drought map changing?
It will be interesting to see on Thursday if the new U.S. Drought Monitor map for Virginia, based on data through Tuesday morning, might scale back the drought a little bit in some areas near and west of the New River.
Already, last week’s map pulled much of Southwest Virginia west of Interstate 77 back to moderate drought, and a tiny spot covering much of Scott County and the eastern fringe of Lee County is back in the yellow shade of merely “abnormally dry.”
The drought on last week’s map remains severe to extreme over most of the western, southern and central parts of Virginia, but it has eroded to only “moderate” in some of Northern Virginia and the Hampton Roads area (with a little dot of “abnormally dry”) westward through Richmond and beyond.
If we could take Sunday and Monday, increase the areal coverage of the rain where everybody in our region gets at least an inch, and then repeat that a couple of times each week for the next two or three months, we would see this drought end or at least whittled down to a fraction of what it has been.
But that might wipe out a lot of pool time.
Potential El Niño effects
That more frequent rain may come later this year with fall and winter patterns related to the El Niño that appears likely to reach strong and possibly historically extreme levels of sea surface warmth in the equatorial Pacific.
We can revisit that (and some already very premature speculation about winter floating around social media) later.
In the shorter term, we may already be seeing more of the typical El Niño summer patterns that often do not allow heat dome highs to get stuck over us for very long.
It may not recover enough to be a truly “cool” summer like some other El Niño summers in our past, but looking back on it after it’s done, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see it as a couple or three hot spells interspersed with cooler, showery periods.
El Niño is also often connected to a less active Atlantic hurricane season, already projected by National Hurricane Center and Colorado State University forecasts.
But that doesn’t mean absolutely no tropical activity, and what does happen often forms pretty close to the U.S. coast.
There have been some indications of a possible tropical system forming off the Gulf Coast this weekend or early next week.
This may or may not come to fruition. We’ll touch back on it in a few days here if it does and looks like a potential contributor to future showery and stormy weather in our backyard.
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.
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