Tuesday was a record-setting 102-degree day at Boston – the big Boston, up north, not South Boston in Halifax County within Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area.
It was plenty hot and sticky in our region, but from official reports it appears that most places stayed below the century mark on Monday and Tuesday.
One exception was the aforementioned South Boston, which did make it to 100 on Tuesday in what is apparently our region’s first triple-digit high of 2025.
Roanoke hit 97 on Tuesday, while Danville and Lynchburg topped out at 96 on consecutive days on Monday and Tuesday. These came up anywhere from 2 to 6 degrees short of record high temperatures for those dates. Places like Blacksburg, Wytheville, and Abingdon all reached the lower 90s in the last couple of days, with mid to upper 80s in many higher elevation locations of our commonwealth’s Southwest corner.
Wednesday, as this weekly weather column posts, promised another likely push into the 90s across much of Cardinal News country, with at least an outside chance that one or two locations could scrape the triple-digit mark.
But the die is already being cast toward a slightly revised weather scene, one that isn’t quite as hot, but similarly sticky, and more stormy. Chances are greater for pop-up storms on Wednesday afternoon, and more so in the latter part of this week, than they were Tuesday, when a couple developed along our region’s borders with West Virginia and Tennessee, after no rain anywhere Sunday and Monday.
The big heat dome high pressure system, centered a little north of us, thus bringing extraordinary heat to the Northeast, is not collapsing, but it is starting to erode somewhat.
It may not feel a lot different in the sticky heat, but this isn’t looking like as lengthy a period of extreme heat as we experienced a year ago at this time. Do you remember that?
Hotter for longer a year ago
Just because it gets this hot in late June doesn’t mean the rest of summer will be like this.
A prime example of that was, well, last summer.
The latter half of June 2024 was hotter for longer than this one has been. Here is a quick rewind:
· Lynchburg hit 99 on June 22 and June 25 and reached at least 95 on three other days in the last 10 days of June 2024.
· Danville was 90 or above on the last 11 days of June a year ago, peaking at 98 on June 26.
· The John H. Kerr Dam in Mecklenburg County poked above the triple-digit mark, to 101, on June 27, 2024.
And that heat wave rolled right into July, about halfway through the month. Roanoke had its first consecutive 100-degree days in 12 years at mid-month, including a 103 high that was the Star City’s hottest day since derecho day, June 29, 2012, when it was 104.
But then summer drove off something of a cliff and the extreme heat ended. Much of the rest of July and most of August was fairly typical, lots of 80s highs, some brief lower-mid 90s in lower elevations at times, and periods of showers and storms unevenly spread across our region, leaving behind some strips of drought while others got soaked.
In fact, late August brought on a period of extraordinary coolness.
While it is generally true that our regional summers have been getting hotter based on average temperature, as has much of the nation and hemisphere, that has been manifesting more as warmer overnight low temperatures over recent years in our region rather than extremely hot high temperatures. And we have been seeing plenty of sticky 70s lows with this most recent round of heat.
Going back to 2012, when temperatures soared into the upper 90s and above 100 across much of our region from June 28 to July 9, that also did not lead to season-long extreme heat, with lots of more typical 80s-lower 90s days most of the rest of July and August.
So just because we’ve had a heat surge here in the latter part of June does not bake in this becoming the norm for the rest of summer.
Sticky-stormy weather inbound
We can’t see clearly what is going to happen with the whole of summer yet, but the weather pattern is already moving away from the recent bout of scorching high temperatures back to more typical to slightly warmer than normal late June and early July temperatures,
The “heat dome” high pressure will continue but is partly filling in, become what is sometimes called a “dirty high,” with lots of trapped moisture and weaker capping inversions of warm air aloft that work against updrafts. As a result, there will be more and more scattered showers and storms in the days ahead as we see lots of 80s and lower to mid 90s highs, the afternoon sun helping lift moisture into colder air high in the atmosphere, forming those cauliflower-like cumulus clouds that tower into the sky and can develop into thunderstorms.
Lift and instability related to our region’s terrain plus occasional disturbances and fairly weak cold fronts pressing eastward into the heat will also contribute to periods of storms over the next several days. As is typical for summer, these will be the kind that might blow and pour hard on a few locations on multiple days while other see sprinkles or very little rain. But you’ll probably hear thunder on lots of days.
Fairly hot, but not extremely hot, and sticky weather with afternoon storms should carry us through the rest of June and into the week before the Fourth of July, the holiday itself being a bit too far out to get much of a read on its weather just yet.
At this point, it doesn’t look like we’ll repeat last summer’s long-lasting extreme heat wave that rolled into mid-July, but there isn’t any signal of a significant cooldown yet, either.
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: