Rain nice respite from dry spell
People across North Idaho and parts of the Spokane Valley got a nice little surprise Tuesday and Wednesday.
A good dose of wet weather, along with some cooler temperatures, gave us a break from what has been a pretty parched July.
Up to a quarter of an inch of rain fell across the Coeur d’Alene area and parts of the Spokane Valley. The official observing site for Spokane at the airport came up dry, unfortunately. The last measurable (.01 inches or more) rainfall there occurred way back on June 21 when they received .24 inches. Only a trace of precipitation has fallen this month in Spokane, and there is a pretty good chance the month will end on a dry note. The last time July was this dry was in 2003 when Spokane also only received a trace of rain. Coeur d’Alene is doing a bit better with .73 inches so far this month, resulting from the rainfall event earlier this week and one other which occurred at the beginning of the month.
With all this dry weather, we have had plenty of sunny days with clear blue skies. We have also had days when things looked a bit hazy. Smoke from wildfires has been the main culprit contributing to that effect, but would you believe a volcanic eruption in Alaska resulted in a cloud of sulfur dioxide streaking across the Inland Northwest skies recently? On July 12 in the Aleutian Islands, the volcano Okmok erupted, sending an ash cloud 35,000 feet into the air.
Ashfall was reported east and southeast of the volcano at eastern Umnak Island and Unalaska/Dutch Harbor. Another cloud made up of sulfur dioxide spewed forth and hovered over the Gulf of Alaska for five days before being picked up by the jet stream and transported across the Pacific Northwest.
The jet stream is merely a fast moving “river of air” occurring at the upper levels of the atmosphere around 20,000 feet. Once the volcanic cloud got caught up in this speedy (averaging 110 mph) current, it was whisked in an easterly direction across our skies. An excellent write up of this event, along with animated satellite images can be found at the National Weather Service Web site www.wrh.noaa.gov /otx/photo_gallery/okmok _cloud.php.
We are now in the climatologically hottest part of the year, which extends from the last week of July to the first week of August. We have yet to reach the 100-degree mark in either Spokane or Coeur d’Alene. The long-range computer models are hinting at a pretty good blast of really hot weather right around Aug. 1, so we may hit those triple digits yet.
Otherwise, the official monthly outlook from the Climate Prediction Center for the month of August as a whole does not point to a trend either way of hotter or colder than normal temperatures or wetter or drier conditions. We’ll just have to wait and see what we get next month.