Tuesday July 27th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

The weekend weather worked out ok for the most part. Saturday morning brought rain, but it cleared up about 1pm. Late afternoon we had about a 10 or 15 minute downpour, and then the skies parted.

The afternoon downpour was a dandy. I was out chopping wood for the grill when it came. I was hot anyway, and being the stubborn one, I kept chopping wood. The rain just kept coming with increasing intensity until it was really hammering. Finally I was driven into the woodshed, and by that time it was funny. The previously seasoned oak that I split up took a lot of camper’s helper to get started in the grills.

Sunday and Monday were nice days but on the hot side. You will have that in late July, that is what beaches and rivers are for.

Today is another warm one, and there is a little extra humidity too. There will be a lot of extra humidity when the storm that is hitting Rhinelander now hits us.

The rain for today and tonight looks like it will be heavy somewhere. A variety of sources brought a variety of opinions on where. They all agree that it will rain, but they vary in how much could fall here. The HPC has it staying north, and us getting 0.75-1.25″. The GFS had similar numbers with1.0-1.5″, and the normally conservative NAM had us getting hit good and weighed in with a possible 1.5-3″. These are QPF numbers for the next 60 hours.

Looking at the US radar animation, the NAM might be onto something.

We are in a fairly typical summer pattern where a dome of hot humid air tries to push north into the region. As it encounters the cooler air to the north, the line between the two sets up quite a battleground for the formation of storms.

Often the storms follow distinct paths illustrating the line between the two air masses. Sometimes waves of the storm come one after another like train cars on a rail right down that line. That is where we get stuff like the horrible flooding in Milwaukee, recent flooding in the Fox Valley, the flooding in the Dells a few summers ago,  and the 9″ of rain in one night in the Peshtigo River watershed a few summers ago.

Right now the radar looks like it is going to train on the Pesh watershed. I say bring it. Yes we have had almost 14″ of rain since June 1, but we only had something like 2.54″ between Jan1 and June 1, and 6 years of drought before that. It is coming around nicely, but 6 years of drought is a big deficit to recover from.

I recall a discussion over the weekend about the gators (mosquitoes). I hardly ever used Repel in May and most of June was pretty good. The last few weekends have found them back to normal. The good news is that I haven’t seen a tick in 6 weeks.

I have been seeing a lot of deer moving around the past few days. I am not sure what draws ’em up to the road, but there have been a lot. Maybe it is the full moon.

Also in the critter department I spotted a couple of different birds along the Peshtigo this weekend. There was an osprey that I have seen and taken pictures of before, but this time he kept some canopy between him and I. I tried, but he was faster.

This guy was a big bird. I saw him coming and got off a couple of frames as he came by. This is the best one.

\

We have some pretty fun events this weekend..

The weekend weather looks pretty good 4 days out. The NWS has us for a nice weekend with comfortable temps in the upper 70s or low 80s. A couple of the forecast models introduced some scattered rain, but it was all random spots in the 0.01-0.1″ per 6 hour range. I will keep an eye on it, but right now the weekend weather looks nice.

That is about it from here. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!

RJB