The month of July started off unbelievably wonderful, as far as the weather is concerned. How often, this time of the year, do we get a break from the humidity? 90+ degree weather is much easier to take with the dewpoints are running in the 50s. Without all that moisture in the air we see a nice cool down at night, and the mornings are so refreshing. Well, hope you didn’t get used to it, because it’s back to reality as we get into the holiday weekend and it looks like next week we will be looking for different ways to say “Hazy, Hot & Humid”.

It’s hard to imagine celebrating Independence Day without it being warm & muggy (not to mention the mosquitoes). The summer I turned seven we moved to Minnesota, just north of St. Paul. We had heard the joke that Minnesota had two seasons; winter and The 4th of July. I believe it was the last summer we lived there, in the early 70s that we watched fireworks in our winter coats as temperatures

The deluge I'm talking about happened Sunday evening into Sunday night across roughly the northwestern third of our viewing area, with surface rainfall reports along a band from around the Triad into the northern Coastal Plain running in the 1-4 inch range, and radar estimates (see attached image) in good agreement with those readings. On the other hand, the showers and storms offered up relatively little rain south and east of a line from about Rocky Mount to Clayton to Southern Pines. So much rain in a short time will tend to help surface water supplies (rivers and reservoirs) a bit more than groundwater levels, but everything helps and this may go a ways toward preventing a worsening of drought conditions in the short term. Streamflows have been very low across central and western NC in recent weeks, but it's interesting to see how some streams are responding to the heavy rains last night. The second image attached, from the U.S. Geological Survey, shows a rapid increase in the flow

That may seem an unlikely title as we find ourselves creeping back into moderate to severe drought designations around central North Carolina, but it comes up in relation to some viewer questions in the wake of all the flooding in the news across the Midwest and along the Mississippi River. The big question is, if we were to get swamped with too much rain over and over as the folks out there have, what levels of rising water would impact which locations?

That is a question that the NC Division of Emergency Management, the US Geological Survey and the National Weather Service have been working on for several years, and there are some useful results available to the rest of us on the web, with more to come in the future. One basic site you might find useful in times when river flooding is a threat is the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service, or AHPS. The address for our area is

http://newweb.erh.noaa.gov/ahps2/index.php?wfo=rah

Here you can click on a gage site for

Last week at this time I was writing about a string of record setting hot afternoons around the area in which the Raleigh-Durham airport reached the century mark on four straight days. Since then, temperatures have remained largely above normal, but have at least backed off by 8-10 degrees or so on average. It appears that we'll start the week this afternoon with one more notably hot day (thankfully with humidity that's not especially oppressive), before a cold front and a developing upper trough across the eastern U.S. gives us a nice break starting Tuesday and running through the end of the week, allowing the above normal temperatures to abate some more.

The pattern bringing normal to slightly below normal temps is something of a mirror of the one that toasted us the past couple of weeks. At that time, we had a broad ridge of high pressure aloft across the eastern third of the country, with a trough farther west. Now we're heading into a stretch with a notable ridge stalled over

I'm a big fan of barbecue.  For me, savoring a gently smoked hunk of meat, cooked low and slow, is pretty close to a divine experience.

Then, I realized today that "smoked meat" and "smoked me" are only two letters apart.  I don't know about you, but I'm starting to feel like I'm the main course.  (And smelling like it, too!)

At last check, the Evans Road fire in eastern NC has already burned somewhere around 40,000 acres.  It is the largest active wildfire anywhere in the United States.  With the recent shift in the winds, a great deal of the smoke from that fire is blowing in our direction.

The forecast has some bad news and some good news.

First, the bad news: The smoke that's already here won't be heading anywhere tonight.  Light winds will not help to move or dissipate the smoke much at all.  In fact, as night falls, what we call an inversion will set up in the