A Summary of Summer 2014

With the Autumnal Equinox having occurred last week, the summer season is over as the heavenly bodies dictate.

Looking back on the summer, I recall to mind periods with abundant moisture, storms, and temperatures on the cool side.

After some fits and starts throughout March, April, and May, it finally felt like summer come mid-June.  The upper-air patterns shifted from their positions they had been in for months, and opened the pathway for moisture to be transported from the Gulf of Mexico right into our area.  This made for a wet, stormy string of days.  I remember a notable line of storms that crossed the area of Saturday, June 21, and, for a time, rained out an outdoor graduation party I attended for some of my cousins.  The abundant moisture also created a string of days with dense fog.

Then there was Monday, June 30, which brought two different derecho events.  A derecho is basically a severe thunderstorm event that lasts for several hours, travels over several hundred miles, and causes damage mainly because of high winds.  One derecho came through in the evening hours, and another much later at night.

Following these storms, the weather cooled off heading into July.  And there were some noticeably cool days in July.  Pieces of the air pattern circulation stationed near the Arctic, the Polar Vortex, broke off and brought cooler air to the Great Lakes region.  The air was also quite dry, with long stretches of time with dewpoints in the 40s, which is more typical of the northern United States autumn weather.

After another warm-up at the end of July and start of August, there was another string of cooler days in the middle of the month.  At one point, cool temperatures combined with a significant amount of moisture created very low cloud ceilings, the level of the base of clouds covering 60% of the sky or more, which caused cancellations of the airplane acrobatics at the Chicago Air and Water Show.

Overall, this summer season wasn't overly warm, but wasn't too cool.  It was a run of the mill kind of summer regarding temperatures, with a good dose of precipitation here and there.