Hot & Windy... Again
WEEKEND FORECAST
Tonight: Mostly Clear becoming Partly Cloudy, Low in the low 70's, Winds South 5-10.
Sunday: Morning Clouds, Clearing to Mostly Sunny, High low 90's, Winds South 10-15
Memorial Day: Morning Clouds, Clearing to Mostly Sunny, High low 90's, Winds South 10-15
Next rain chance looks to be late Monday or Tuesday. A cold front might get here by Thursday to give us both a rain chance as a chance to break the current run of hot days. Starting by Thursday and for the first weekend in June we should have highs in the 80's.
EARLY START TO A PREDICTED NEAR NORMAL HURRICANE SEASON
The named storm Beryl sits of the coast of North Carolina. It is already the second tropical system of the an Atlantic hurricane season that doesn't even start to next Friday. The forecast is for Beryl to bring heavy rains into southern Georgia and northern Florida over the next three days.
Meanwhile, what remains of Hurricane Bud in the Pacific is coming on shore in Mexico. This will produce a stream of high clouds (and some additional moisture) into north Texas over the next couple of days. The next lifting system (a cold front that stalls to our north by Tuesday) could tap into this water vapor supply and increase our rain chances. Of course this steady south wind already primes the pump with our traditional source of water vapor, the Gulf.
ON THE WEATHER OF LATE
We continue with a weather pattern much the same of late. Hot, dry and windy. To recap the month of May a bit, we started just a few days in with a string of 90 degree weather. The rumblings began wondering if we were going to jump back to the unbearable weather of last summer. That was the hottest summer in the last 114 years and what followed was a very mild winter. As we close toward the end of meteorological Spring (May 31st) looking at the highs and lows of the last three months revel yet another warm season. This Spring will likely be remembered as the second-warmest in our history.
What mediates this warm trend is the bountiful rain. We live in an area that straddles a tight gradient of isohyets, lines showing areas of equal average rainfall. Drive an hour east of Dallas and the average rainfall gets into the mid-40's (inches of rain) a year. Drive an hour west of Fort Worth and that number drops in half. Remember that this is the AVERAGE so it would be expected that those isohyet lines drift west or east any given year.
This winter and early Spring the lines drifted west, in other words rainfall was bountiful. This was very welcomed at the water reserviors that dropped by the end of summer last year to worrisome levels (remember, always remember, that we drink our surface water here in north Texas from man-made lakes that capture the river [primarily the Trinity, Sabine and Brazos] flow before it heads to the Gulf).
After a wet start to the year May had well below normal rainfall. And after a nice two-week run of cooler following those first 90 degree days of May we launched into this current streak of hot (and dry) weather (five days and counting to eight by the time we close the holiday weekend).
One can't help but to glance into the rearview mirror and ponder the heat of late. In the last six summers we've seen four of the top eleven hottest summers in the last 114 years. Last summer broke what was thought to be a near unbreakable number of 100 degree days logged in one year (many thought that 1980 was an abnormality; it turned out to be just a precurser of weather in the new century).
Our shift from hot-to- cool, wet-to-dry seems to ride its fate on the water temperatures of the southern Pacific. The trend lately (last six years say) seems to be we get an exaggerated weather pattern that is rooted in the El Nino/La Nina cycle. I write "seems" because we'll likely have to be ten years down the road before we could quantify that.
Regardless of all this climatology, the long range forecast continues to predict another hot (but not necessarily dry) summer. If "hot" is the new normal than changes in the way we use our water should shift to a new normal as well. What should else shift is the astetic to what a typical home looks like in north Texas. It should be designed to keep direct sunlight from hitting the glazing, should build in shade and have a reflective roof. The new neighborhoods would have houses oriented to the sun angle instead of the street view.
Instead of groomed mono-culture grass we could go retro; bio-mimicry of the biosphere of the past. The orginal praire grass of Tarrant and Dallas counties evolved over the millinium to thrive in the climate varability of our region. Remember my point earlier about how our water supply comes from the surface water? The largest crop in north Texas (and this county) isn't row crops but grass. Water use jumps 60-70% in our area when we get to the lawn-watering season.
Image a yard of a (certainly) different aesthetic but one not needing much (if any) water and no pesticides. This could lead to two favorable directions at the same time: less expensive water (less demand=lower cost) and better quality water (less fertilizer and pesticide run-off). The BRIT at the Fort Worth Botantical garden is currently researching this idea of a new kind of yard in DFW, a new that is very old. In a climate that seems to be giving us a new kind of hot.