We’ve been hearing about the horrible wildfires in Texas lately. Well there is severe drought ongoing in northern Minnesota as well. In fact on August 18th a forest fire began due to lightning in the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area about 14 miles east of Ely. Officials have been conducting specialized firefighting operations over the past few weeks to gradually contain in.
It is really pretty remarkable all the data and technology they employ to fight such fires. About 1700 acres have been burned so far by the so called Pagami Creek Fire. You can learn much more about this fire by checking out this website. http://www.inciweb.org/incident/2534/
If you looked carefully into the sky Friday in parts of the TV-9 viewing area, you may have noticed a thin milky haze or veil way up high. This was actually smoke suspended many thousand feet above us that originated in northern Minnesota and Canadian fires. We’ve had a persistent flow of air from the north, northwest in the middle levels of the atmosphere over the past week driving down particles from those areas. Notice on the satellite image from Friday there are some some ribbons of the smoke showing up, especially in western Wisconsin. The dark color on the image indicates clear skies, while the smoke areas have a light gray or milky shade. Heavier clouds from a storm south of Wisconsin show up as a brighter, opaque white.
Other Weather News: Summer 2011 Very Warm Across the U.S.
According to NOAA and the National Climatic Data Center, meteorological summer 2011 (June – August) was the second warmest in recorded history. The average temperature across the U.S was 74.5 degrees which is 2.4 degrees above normal. The hottest summer ever was that of 1936 with an average temperature of 74.6 degrees. However the state of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana did have their hottest summer on record in 2011. Of course they also had exceptional drought. Their number of days with 100 degrees or higher was off the charts. Some areas had over 70 days of such heat. You can get a better feel which states had the most hot days by viewing the map below from NOAA.
You can also get many more interesting facts about summer 2011 weather including precipitation trends from this link. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110908_auguststats.html
Posted under Monthly Recap, Seasonal Items, Summer, Weather NEws
This post was written by Tony Schumacher on September 9, 2011
From an old post:
“By the way, we are now using a new set of “normals” that covers the period from 1981 to 2010. Up until August we were using data from the 30 year period from 1971 to 2000 for the “normals”.”
So how do the new normals compare to the old ones?