Hit And Miss Vermont Downpours Depart, Humidity Unfortunately Lingers On And On

Kind of a chaotic looking sky over South Burlington,
Vermont Tuesday amid scattered torrential downpours.

Those torrential downpours that hit just a few spots in Vermont yesterday are mostly gone, but unfortunately, the humidity is not.  

This is turning into one of those Augusts in which summer doesn't want to end. There seemed to be a turning point mid-month when we seemed to want to go into the normal late August cooling. You know, fair week weather. Warmish but not hot afternoons, cool nights. 

Well, that's been interrupted for now, hasn't it? This was the fourth morning in a row in which the overnight low in Burlington was close to 70 degrees. Dew points, a measure of how humid it is, remain stubbornly in the mid to upper 60s.

That humidity is why we had those gully washers on Tuesday. It wasn't full on drought relief, because a lot of places missed out. 

An impressively dark cloud I saw north of Burlington early Tuesday afternoon seems to have unleashed on Westford, which reported 3.08 inches. Other hot spots for rain include Brunswick, in the Northeast Kingdom, with 3..01 inches of rain. A spot near New Haven reported just over two inches.

There surely was some minor damage from the worst of these storms, but I have no reports of anything serious.

Springfield reported 1.67 inches and Rutland clocked in with just under an inch. Here at my hacienda in St. Albans, I received a respectable 0.6 inches.

Other places got cheated and remain dry, despite the humidity. Burlington had a ho-hum 0.22 inches. Montpelier only managed 0.03 inches.  

Elsewhere in New England, a small section of southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, under severe drought, received up to seven inches of rain in a few hours, causing flash flooding. That continues a trend we've seen in much of the nation with droughts and floods combining. 

In this soupy air, watch out for patchy dense fog this morning. There could be a few scattered showers and storms today, but they will be few and far between. The best chances will be in the Northeast Kingdom.

The next chance of any rain is late Thursday night and Friday.  A cold front will be interacting with the humid air to launch more showers and storms. It's too soon to know for sure, but if we end up with any slow moving or "training" storms, we could be dealing again with.

The cold front will bring brief relief from the humidity Friday night and Saturday. But it will start to warm up again Sunday, though on that day the humidity will still be manageable under sunny skies. But it will probably be oppressive again by Monday and Tuesday.

There is some hope - not a certainty - that we will finally get a push of refreshing, slightly autumnal air during the middle of next week.