This about says it all…my wife found our dog Shilo (who loves the outside world) in the shade of our garden taking in the view. No doubt about it…the dog days of summer are here!
A heat advisory remains in effect for central and western Middle Tennessee through Tuesday evening. We are adding one or two degrees to our temperatures each day and along with the humidity, the heat index will climb well above 100 degrees for the next two afternoons. As if you needed another reason to limit your time outdoors, air quality will again be poor this afternoon.
Official Nashville International high temp yesterday: 94 degrees…amazingly not the warmest temperature so far this summer (96.) While we may still get around 96 today or Tuesday, it seems as if readings didn’t quite jump to touted levels. Why? Probably the soil moisture. The remnants of Dennis brought in some much needed rainfall two weeks ago and made our lawns greener. (More green than they probably should be this time of year.) It is no mistake that our two warmest days (June 30th and July 4th) came before that rain did. That 2-5″ of rain from Dennis did a number on our chances to hit 100 this summer. No doubt we would have been talking 100+ temperatures today if Dennis hadn’t visited. Still we can’t rule out that chance of 100 later this summer if we have an extended period of dry weather in the late July/early August timeframe. As a matter of fact, we are about a half inch of rain shy of the norm for the month of July so far.
We show you regularly the airport readings across the state, but there are dozens of other readings from observers throughout Middle Tennessee…they are updated every day around mid morning here under the title of “Middle Tennessee Weather Summary.”
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ohx/climate.html
Look for your community!
Interesting article about how the abnormally high temperatures may linger for awhile out west: http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050721_heat_more.html
The tropics remain busy but aren’t gathering headlines because the named storms (Franklin and Gert) are only tropical storms. You can updates on each here: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
Stay cool out there!!!!
