Weird Vermont Wet Spots Amid Very Dry Week; Heat Wave Looms

National Weather Service radar from around 6:15 a.m. 
today showed slow moving showers and downpours
in southern Vermont. While most of us are bone
dry, a few isolated places are picking up a lot of
rain. More widely scattered storms all day today.

 As you know, I've been harping about how dry it's getting out there, and how the forest fire danger is rising and all that.  

That's all still very true. 

Interspersed with the dryness is some isolated very wet spots. It's the strange winners/losers situation we sometimes see in the summer. 

The few showers and thunderstorms developed Wednesday, just as they did Tuesday. Almost all of them were in central and southern Vermont. 

The storms that got going moved very slowly,  managing to dump quite a bit of rain on just a couple spots. There's not much in the way of specific reports, since most of the showers and storms have avoided major reporting stations. 

But there are isolated spots in New England that are soggy amid an overall dry spell. Lebanon, New Hampshire, just over the border from White River Junction has 0.83 inches of rain in a late Wednesday afternoon thunderstorm.   

Just over the Vermont border in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, as much as 1.75 inches of rain fell Wednesday.

A patch of rain early this morning over far southern Green Mountains east of Bennington and southwest of Springfield this morning has surely dumped at least a half inch if not more in a few towns down there. I say that because those storms were just sitting there, hardly moving.

We'll continue that state of affairs today. 

More thunderstorms will erupt today here and there. With nothing to steer the storms, some might sit over the same spot for quite a while. So, though the risk is very low, there could be one or two pinpoint spots maybe in the central and southern Green Mountains that could have a local minor flash flood. 

 The chances of you seeing a thunderstorm today is pretty low,  probably not much better than 30 percent, if that. They could pop up almost anywhere, based on just local breezes, the remnants of old storms or subtle ripples in the atmosphere. There's really no real weather front or storm to kick off anything. Just August summertime doldrums. 

The more likely spots are in the Adirodacks and Green Mountains, where the slopes create the start of the updrafts needed to get storms going. There could be some storms near the western shore of Lake Champlain, where a breeze off the lake might interact with updrafts along the eastern edge of the Adirondacks. 

I'll emphasize that at least 99 percent of us will have no trouble. And the majority of us will see another day with no rain at all.  So, while it pours like hell in one or two towns, the rest of Vermont and surrounding areas continue to endure our dusty, smoky weather.  

SMOKE/HEAT

Other than the isolated thunderstorms and downpours, the trend now is for slowly decreasing smoke and noticeably increasing heat. 

The smoke is still sitting over us, with no place to go, no real wind to flush it out.

National Weather Service calling for moderate
to major heat wave in the Northeast. This map
is for Monday. Red areas will be the most
uncomfortable relative to local averages. 

 But the air is slowly getting better as the smoke particles continue to slowly fall out of the sky. 

Air quality alerts have expired, but some pollution remains, so it's not clean and refreshing out there. This slow trend toward less smoke will continue, but it'll stay hazy out there into the weekend. 

The real story is the heat coming in. That big high pressure system that's been over Quebec is now moving off the New England coast. It'll work in concert with the famous summertime Bermuda high to pump hot air our way. 

This hot air will last awhile,

The warmup has already started. Wednesday was a couple degrees warmer than Tuesday. This mornings readings were was a couple higher than yesterday's dawn, but still comfortable, 

Each day today through Monday will be a little hotter than the day before. An example, forecast daily highs today through Tuesday go as follows: 83, 85, 88, 91, 94, 92.  Nights will grow increasingly uncomfortable as we head into the weekend. 

So yea, hot. The humidity will also slowly increase, and will become pretty oppressive by early this week, The strong high pressure means sinking air, so the will suppress the chances for showers and storms Friday through Monday. 

That doesn't mean there won't be any widely scattered storms through that period. It just means if any do manage to get going, they'll be few, far between and brief.

It looks like a weak cold front still wants to approach us about next Tuesday, Judging from the forecasts, I'm still pretty unimpressed with what the front will look like. It probably won't bring temperatures down all that much, and I still question how much rain it might bring.