Enjoying The Pretty Vermont Clouds While West Wilts In Record, Incredible Heat

A shower crossing Lake Champlain Tuesday, as seen from 
South Hero, Vermont. Needed rain in a few parts of 
Vermont. Meanwhile, incredible heat and drought
intensifies in the western United States.

One of the things I like most about summer in Vermont is the sky is often much more interesting than in the winter. 

On days when there's scattered thunderstorms, these beautiful towers of clouds rise high in the sky. As they did on Tuesday. 

These clouds are full of texture, shades of white and gray and sometimes black.  I can watch them all day. 

These clouds are no comparison to the spectacular, otherworldly and dramatic photos of supercells from the giant storms in the Plains. 

But it's OK that we tend to be more mellow here in the Green Mountain State.  Pretty clouds can be just as pleasing as dramatic ones. 

At least around my place in northwestern Vermont,  Tuesday's interesting clouds did little good. I'm basically in the (not so) Great St. Albans Desert, so showers and thunderstorms have a habit of detouring around me. They soak nearby Georgia, Vermont just to the south, and Highgate, just to the north. 

So, all my thirsty gardens got was a piddling sprinkles and brief periods of light rain. Oh well. 

I'm sure people out in the western United States would have begged for Tuesday evening's St Albans sprinkles and temperatures that dropped into the low 60s immediately behind the drizzly cold front toward evening. 

The western heat wave is only just beginning and already, all kinds of record highs are crashing.  Salt Lake City, Utah, reached 107 degrees Tuesday, tying its all time record high for any date, and breaking the record high for the month of June. 

The heat was pretty much unprecedented, especially for so early in the season up in Montana and Wyoming. When record highs are broken, it's usually by a degree or two. Tuesday's records were shattered by five or even 10 degrees. 

Some examples:

Billings, Montana reached 105 degrees, old record 98

Livingston, Montana 98 old record, 88

Miles City, Montana, 109, old record 97

Sheridan, Wyoming, 108, old record 98.  Sheridan, like Salt Lake City, tied its all time record high for any date on the calendar. 

Greybull, Wyoming reached 108 degrees, breaking the old record for the date by an astonishing 20 degrees. Laramie, Wyoming, often one of the nation's notorious cold spots,  also tied its all time record high, reaching 94 degrees. 

High elevations stayed hot, too, as NBC News reported. Grand Junction, Colorado, at 4,500 feet above sea level, was at 105 degrees. Flagstaff, Arizona, way up there at 6.900 feet, had a record high of 91 degrees. 

The heat and the intense drought in the West are feeding off each other in a nasty feedback loop. The lack of moisture means more of the sun's energy can go into heating the air, helping cause the record high temperatures. 

Those record high temperatures help dry things out further, making an extreme drought even worse. 

The intense heat is forecast to continue out west for the rest of the week. 

This latest heat crisis has all the fingerprints of climate change. It's still true that you really can't take one weather event and automatically blame climate change. But this is so consistent with what scientists keep telling us that climate change would bring that it practically screams it. 

This is especially true since it's only mid-June, and the Northern Hemisphere has already experienced several record breaking heat waves, including one earlier this month right here in Vermont and the rest of the Northeast. 

These hot spells have consequences. Wildfires are breaking out like crazy out West, and existing fires are exploding in size and power. 

Speaking of power, electrical grids are straining as everybody's air conditioners work overtime to keep up with the usage. 

In Texas, where it's hot but not super unusual for them, they're already threatening rolling blackouts again. Though the Texas situation has more to do with mismanagement than climate change. 

I complained at the start over the relative lack of rain around my St. Albans, Vermont house. But it did rain a little. And it's blessedly cool out.  There are no big heat waves in Vermont's immediate future, but gawd knows what July and August will bring. 

I'm lucky to just sit back and enjoy those beautiful summertime towers of clouds, and hope the people suffering from the heat in the West see some nice, wet cold fronts soon. 

Those cold fronts are not in the forecast out there, but one can hope and pray.