Midsummer To Take The Wind Out Of Our Sails

Trees bend in the wind last Saturday in St. 
Albans. It's been a strangely windy summer so
far, but we are now reverting back to our
normal, calmer summer pattern

 Yesterday was another strangely windy one, especially in the Champlain Valley. 

The peak wind gust in Burlington was 39 mph. It was enough for another round of widely scattered tree damage. 

I found myself swerving around a tree branch on Spear Street in South Burlington, and I saw a report of a tree blocking Route 7 for a time between Milton and Georgia. 

Summer is usually a very calm time of year here in Vermont. Yes, you do occasionally get local damaging wind gusts in severe thunderstorms. But other than that, the wind just usually doesn't blow much. 

To get a gusty day, you need strong weather systems, be they large storm systems passing nearby or a contrast between a storm and strong high pressure fighting for control.

Overall weather systems in the summer tend to be weak. "Storms" usually consist of weak cold fronts limping through, with their parent low pressure systems far to the north.  Maybe a bubble of high pressure of meh strength gives us a refreshing north breeze on occasion. Or, the sprawling Bermuda High far off the East Coast pumps a lazy stream of humid winds northward into our neck of the woods.

Trees sway in the wind, pictured on June 27, when
winds were gusting past 30 mph. 

The weak summer systems can still cause a lot of mischief, but wind is rarely one of them. 

You might remember during last year's epic floods on July 10, there was little wind. 

It was an otherwise  weather system of so-so strength that brought incredible amounts of Atlantic moisture into Vermont and dumped it as downpours over our mountains. 

This year, for some reason, the weather systems remained relatively strong up until now. 

Yesterday, a large, strong for the season storm way up by James Bay Canada bumped into high pressure departing to our east to produce the winds. 

This sort of thing happened during most of June. I saw ten days during the month where gusts reached or exceeded 30 mph during June.  That kind of wind frequency is common in say, January, but not June.

As of today, it looks like we're finally getting into the weather patterns more typical of summer, meaning the wind is taken out of your sails as of today. Don't worry if you have a sailboat or anything like that, there will be plenty of breezes to keep you going the rest of this summer.

We just won't have the loud gusty winds we've had lately. Any system that comes through, at least in the near future, will be pretty weak.  

One boundary came through with light showers last night. Behind it, we're in sort of a no mans land of nothing going on. The next thing to come through should set off some showers and local downpours Friday night and Saturday, but that one, too, is no wind bag. Then it's rinse and repeat beyond that. 

The bottom line: It's now safe to unfurl your deck umbrellas again.