"Chamber Of Commerce" Vermont Weather To Slowly Be Replaced By Lots Of Rain Chances

Thanks to my husband's hard work, our deck is all
set for us to enjoy the "Chamber of Commerce" 
weather we've been having lately. 

Since Thursday afternoon, most of Vermont has been enjoying what is known as Chamber of Commerce weather. 

You know what that means. Sunny days, low humidity, comfortable temperatures. It's the kind of conditions that definitely keep tourists happy, not to mention the locals.

 This type of weather keeps the cash flowing, as people want to be out and about and doing things in this great sunshine and comfortable temperatures. 

Enjoy it for a couple more days, as the bright sunshine will eventually fade into showers. 

One pretty interesting thing that happened both Saturday and Sunday afternoon is how the sun's heat created updrafts, which poked up to several thousand feet overhead. The atmosphere was dry throughout,   so that didn't generate any clouds or showers like what might happen on a humid day. 

The air aloft was even drier. Desert dry.   The updrafts made some of that upper level super dry air mix down. So in the mid-afternoon, the low humidity we were already experiencing really crashed. 

Dew points - a  rough measure of how humid the air feels -  fell into the 30s both weekend afternoons. That's super low for this time of year. For a comparison, if the dew point is at 60 degrees, it begins to feel a little humid-ish. Dew points in the 50s are considered very comfortable during the summer. 

Dry air can heat up much faster than humid air. So when the humidity crashed, temperatures rocketed right up into the 80s both afternoons. This type of situation is par for the course in deserts, but it a fun quirk to watch here in Vermont

TRANSITIONS

The weather pattern is gradually transitioning and we'll eventually have to say goodbye to that Chamber of Commerce weather for now. 

One reason why the weather is staying so nice for so long is that summer weather patterns don't change nearly as quickly as they do in the winter. But it does change. The whole set up over the United States will slowly shift eastward, eventually setting the Northeast up for a long spell of showery weather. Meanwhile, heat will build in what was previously the cool and unsettled western United States.

The first phase of that will make things even a little more summery for the next couple of days.  The sun will mostly stay out today, tomorrow and to an extent Wednesday, but the air will start to feel ever so slightly more humid, and still quite warm. The humidity will still be in the comfortable zone, but it won't crash as much in the afternoons as it did during the weekend.

And we'll start to hear about shower chances. There's an ever so slight chance of an isolated shower, mostly over the mountains Tuesday afternoon. We have a slightly better chance Wednesday, though the majority of us will stay dry that day, too.

As the new pattern establishes itself, we might finally get wet Thursday. By then, we will have needed the rain, because most of us will have been dry for a week.  It's still unclear how much rain we'll see Thursday, and what time of day will see the bulk of it. 

It's also still unclear if it will rain Thursday. Some models keep things to our west until Friday or even Saturday. Stay tuned. 

Given the slow pace of June weather shifts, the cooler, wetter regime should stick around all weekend and probably most of next week.  I'm not how cool it will get, but I don't expect anything that out of whack for this time of year. Chances are, it could even be fairly close to  normal. Again, we'll need updated forecasts to figure that one out. 

I don't think any given day after Thursday will be a washout, but there will be daily chances of showers. The distribution of showers and how much rain we'll see each day depends on the arrangement of small weather disturbances within this vast area of unsettled weather over the Northeast. It's way too soon to forecast those fussy details. 

The heat wave that is building in the West looks like it will be a record breaker in many areas. Climatologists and long range forecasters have been predicting blockbuster heat waves this summer in the U.S.

That prediction already seems to be coming true. 

We've already had impressive early season heat in Texas and Florida, and now it's the western United States' turn. 

We'll avoid heat waves in Vermont through the middle of June, but there's still plenty of time after that for hot weather. We're still obviously waiting to see how all that sugars out.