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Flowers in my St. Albans, Vermont garden on a humid morning this past July. It's been a VERY humid summer in Vermont. |
The normal spells of cool, dry air have been hard to come by this summer and August has been particularly terrible in that regard.
One way to judge the humidity of a particular summer is to look at whether there's been a lot of warm nights. The temperatures stays up on muggy nights compared to evenings when the humidity is low.
If you get a night in Vermont that stays at 70 or above, it's stuffy, no matter how you look at it.
To prove my point that this summer has been a humid one around here, the following paragraphs might have more than a few numbers. But it's pretty illustrative.
So far this year, there have been 18 days in Burlington, Vermont that failed to get under 70 degrees for an overnight low.
I haven't been able to check all years, but the number of days that failed to get below 70 in Burlington seems iclose to a record. Last year is considered the hottest summer on record in Burlington, but there were only 10 days that never got below 70 degrees.
The year 1949, which had the most 90s on record, had only 14 days that stayed above 70. This year so far we've had twelve 90 degree days, definitely well above normal but not close to the record of 26 such days.
The year 2018 is so far barely beating out this year for stuffy nights . There was 19 days at or above 70 that year. The year 2018 was the third hottest summer on record. It looks like this summer will come in fourth of fifth on that list.
The bouts of stuffy nights this summer have been long lasting, We had four consecutive nights in late June in which that temperature stayed at or above 70 degrees.
July was regarded as relatively "cool" but that's because we had so many clouds that daytime temperatures were suppressed. We still had two 70 degree nights in July and many overnight "lows" that month were in the mid and upper 60s.
Burlington had five consecutive days that stayed at or above 70 degrees from August 9-13, the longest stretch since 1901. We just endured a full week in which the low temperature was 69 or higher, with five of those seven nights staying at or above 70 degrees.
The more consecutive nights in which it is uncomfortable for sleeping, the more dangerous it gets. Many houses in Vermont have no air conditioning. The longer a period of icky humid weather lasts, the more it can wear a person down. That gets risky for people with underlying health conditions. That's why we're always told to get people into cool spots like air conditioned rooms to give them and their bodies a break.
This morning in Burlington spelled slight "relief" as it was 66 degrees for a low. But we have more Florida like weather to endure the next two days or so.
All this mugginess and these uncomfortable nights in Vermont are consistent with climate change. The world is getting hotter, so you it stands to reason that it would get hotter. Hotter air in general can hold more moisture, so it stands to reason that we'd get more humid weather, especially if the air flow is off the tropical Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico, which is frequent in the summer.
In the short term, relief is on the way. It's the end of August, so cold fronts are starting to have a little more oomph than they did midsummer.
A cold front is coming through Thursday night, and you are going to LOVE Friday. The sun will be out, daytime temperatures will be only in the low 70s. More importantly, dew points will be in the 50s. Dew points temperatures are a good measure of how uncomfortable it is out there.
If the dew point is near 70, which it has been most of the time in the past week. If dew points are in the 50s, it's very comfortable.
We stand the risk of having more bouts of humidity as we go into September, but those periods will get shorter and shorter and weaker and weaker as we head into autumn. It looks like it might get quite sticky again early next week, but that spell shouldn't last nearly as long as the one we are enduring now.
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