We entered July with a big heat spell that lasted through the first week. Temperatures are still warmer than normal now but not as high as the past week, and the pattern has shifted so that we are back in the flow of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, which has allowed scattered showers to occur over the last few days. The cloud cover has helped reduce the daytime temperatures but overnight lows are quite high because the humidity is so high due to the showers. We can expect warmer than normal temperatures to continue through the rest of the month with little relief, although we may see some weak cold fronts try to push through the region during the month.
Because of the showers, precipitation is looking a little better than in June, when we were under persistent high pressure that kept daily showers from forming. That area of high pressure has moved off to the north and east, allowing scattered showers to develop over parts of the region each day. I expect to see more frequent pop-up thunderstorms occurring over the rest of the month, although there may be some dry spells of a day or two. And because it will be spotty rain, you can expect to see a lot of local variations of rainfall, with some fields getting a lot of rain while ones a mile away can get practically none. In general, I expect to see more rain in the southern half of Georgia and Alabama and in Florida than the northern part of the region because of more frequent inflow of moisture into that area. Because of the high temperatures and the heavy thunderstorm rain that runs off instead of sinking into the soil, it is likely that drought is likely to strengthen in northern parts of the region this month.
As you probably know, tropical activity has picked up. Hurricane Beryl followed a typical pattern for an August or September storm, forming in the central Atlantic and moving WNW near Jamaica and over the Yucatan before turning north and hitting the Texas coast as a strong category 1 storm after weakening to tropical storm level as it went over land. The Southeast received very little rain from Beryl, but the circulation around the storm helped pump more moisture into the region, adding to the showers. The tropics are expected to calm down for at least the next couple of weeks as they often do in July due to the inhibiting factor of Saharan dust over the main development area for the storms, so I don’t expect a lot of tropical activity to affect us for the rest of July. Things are likely to pick up a lot by mid-August, though, so don’t let your guard down. The latest Atlantic tropical season forecast from Colorado State University, released today, increases the number of expected named storms to 25 for this year, so once the dust goes away and the waves off of Africa start moving west, we can expect to see a string of storms forming and moving towards the western Atlantic by late August and most likely through October or even later on a regular basis. Of course we don’t know where they will go and whether they will bring any rain to us, so we cannot tell at this point if we will get any relief from tropical rainfall or not. If you have not done your hurricane preparations yet, now is a good time to do so.
