Where The Rain Be At?

If you haven't noticed it's summer and with little tropical activity of late we have officially hit sporadic thundershower season.  Some places have seen a decent amount of rain while others have seen very little.  It's a big game of hit or miss and some of the hits are proving damaging.

Not often on a sunny day do you get alerts about tornadoes.  Somehow I am still on a list to receive warnings for certain counties when advisories are issued from the weather service.  Sure enough up pops the tornado warning for Northampton county.  Warnings are not good.  That's a clear indication something is happening as opposed to something might happen.  Now the county isn't very big, but it is somewhat long or at least longer than you might think as it extends to the Delaware Water Gap.  I knew it was unlikely Bethlehem was in danger.  Yet where I was at work there was absolutely nothing.  By the looks of it some communities across the border in New Jersey did in fact deal with a relatively weak and short-lived tornado.  This has not been confirmed simply my opinion.

If you were around Saturday you would have seen quite a storm line form and head towards the Lehigh Valley and Poconos.  The perk of being elevated and facing west really comes in handy when storms approach.  This was true again.

The bright portion of the picture below the dark clouds is a shield of water.  Here are a few more as it got closer and during.

Visibility clearly took a hit.  Oddly enough the storm did not have much lightning though when you are above the trees it can be a little weird sometimes.  It also passed through quickly allowing the sun to return.  But if you were 30 miles to the south you would have never known a line passed close by.


It goes to show that without tropical moisture we rely on the thunderstorm for our summer precipitation.  So far we aren't in a horrible position.  Get back to me next week though and I'll post this map again.  To be clear the yellow on the map is the first shade in the drought monitor so our area is under the abnormally dry condition.  Parts of central and northern New Jersey are beginning to experience a drought.

It's not too hard to understand why.  Less than two inches of rain was reported in Allentown in March, April and June.  July has been hotter than normal and that pattern looks to continue throughout the rest of the month


TRIVIA ANSWER:  The only date that has seen snow each of the past three years is February 9th.


Guess Again:  Our average highest daily temperature is 84 and our coldest average daily temperature is 19.  A basic understanding of math would suggest that we see temperatures both above and below these figures.  So what would be considered abnormal?  I don't know, but I went with a higher or colder than average temperature of 10 degrees (about) or 95 or hotter in summer and 9 or colder in winter.  Which leads to the question ---

Since 2014 how many times have we hit at least 95 degrees and how many times have we gone below 9?