Hot and dry weather on its way after wet start to the week

CATHY WURZER: Can you believe-- I cannot believe it. It's almost August. And I really hate to be the one to say this, but for the next six months, the average temperature only declines from here on out until January 25, when it will slowly increase again. I know it. And it hasn't been a very hot summer. Soggy, yes, but not exactly hot. Our chief meteorologist Paul Huttner, is here with the latest rainfall totals and the outlook for the rest of the month. How are you doing?

PAUL HUTTNER: I'm doing great. I'm so glad you said that and I didn't have to because, yeah, tis that time of year. And it has been the soggy summer of '24. You know, we talked about the wettest spring, April, May, June, 15 inches of rain in Minnesota. We've had rain on 64% of days in June and July, 6 plus of 10 days we've had rain, Cathy.

CATHY WURZER: That's amazing. Aye yai yai. So I'm hoping we can dry out and maybe warm up because it hurts my heart to say that we're going to be kind of declining in temperature here until January.

PAUL HUTTNER: I think the best of summer is yet to come. The second half of summer in Minnesota is usually better than the first half. And just here's a case in point, too. 18 of 30 days we saw rain in June, 16 of 23 in July. The longest stretch, Cathy, we've been without rain in the Twin Cities, at least a trace, is four days from June 23 to 26 and July 16 to 19. So we need a stretch of dry days. It looks like we're going to string together a few starting this week, maybe four, maybe five days in a row of dry weather.

We still got a few clouds hanging around Southern Minnesota today, 79 for the high. We've already hit 74 in the Twin Cities, a little more sun as we go through the afternoon. Then Thursday, right through Saturday, mostly sunny to partly cloudy. Twin Cities were 83 on Thursday, 87 Friday. We'll be near 90 Twin Cities, Southern Minnesota, Saturday, maybe 80s up north.

And then the next chance of rain, and it looks so scattered, comes in late Sunday into Monday. So that's our next chance of rain. So we may get four or five dry days in a row. European models saying we should be at or near 90 next week so we might tick off some more 90s next week. And Cathy, overall, the forecast models are saying not dry but drier in the next one to two weeks. So I really think our weather is going to feel a lot more summerlike as we move through the next one to two weeks. And we'll see a lot more sunshine and less rain.

CATHY WURZER: OK. Good. Glad to hear that as we get into the last part of the summer here and the state fair. Say, we probably might see some weather warnings perhaps here in the next few days. We'll see. What do you think-- and I looked at this. And I thought, oh, I hadn't heard about this. The National Weather Service having partial county alerts. And I'm wondering, the smaller warning zones, like for Hennepin County, when did they start that? Why are they going in that direction?

PAUL HUTTNER: Well, they're collecting feedback right now. It's a process they're going through. And folks can jump on their website, the Twin Cities National Weather Service, through the end of the month and give their feedback. Here's what they're trying to do. They're going to break--

Hennepin County is a big county, so they're going to break it up into Northwest, Northeast, West Central, Central , and East Central, and South. And they would only alert for that smaller portion of the county, say, for a severe thunderstorm or a tornado warning. Now, our NOAA weather radios, they have this thing called the SAME code, the Special Area Message Encoding. So it's a code that you put in your weather radio and it will only go off in your area. That way you're not getting warnings for, you know, all over the place.

So they're taking feedback on this. Do we break up the county into smaller slices and just warn for that area? So it's kind of an interesting process. One of the things I observed, Cathy, is that works great on some storms. Some storms are big enough and moving fast enough that they're just going to blow right through that so they'd probably issue multiple smaller warnings for a larger area in that situation.

CATHY WURZER: Of course, being a weather geek, I want to know where the storms are in relation to where I am. So you know what I'm saying? I just want to know the whole picture. So interesting that they're doing this.

Say, I woke up this morning, looked out the window, and noticed that the sunrise was brilliant, that big ball of orange in the sky. And I thought, oh, is that because of wildfire smoke? Will we see more smoke?

PAUL HUTTNER: We may. Here's the thing. There are just numerous fires in Canada and the Western US. Now there's a big smoke shield, Cathy, that covers much of West Central Canada and parts of the Western US. And it's over Minnesota, part of it. Most of it's aloft over Minnesota. Our air quality at ground level is good in most of Minnesota today, a little moderate in the Western part of Minnesota. We got a little northeast breeze off Lake Superior that's cleaned our air up a bit. But it's unhealthy at the surface in the Western Dakotas and really unhealthy parts of Idaho and parts of Canada.

Our south winds are going to help us out. They're going to shift around the next few days so they'll keep that smoke at bay a bit. But it is a huge plume, Kathy. And it's only a matter of time, I think, until those winds shift and we're going to get more smoke and potentially some air quality alerts in Minnesota. We're getting really lucky with the surface wind flow this week across Minnesota.

CATHY WURZER: And are you talking about this very same thing here, air quality forecasting, on Climate Cast?

PAUL HUTTNER: We are. I thought it would be a good time to revisit Matt Carlson. He's a meteorologist with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. They are the ones that send out those daily air quality forecasts. And so I thought we'd talk about smoke trends, air quality alert trends due to wildfire smoke in Minnesota-- they've more than doubled in the last decade or so-- and how do you determine when that smoke up at 10,000, 15,000 is coming down to the ground. So kind of interesting stuff. We'll geek out on a little air quality meteorology forecasting on Climate Cast tomorrow on All Things Considered.

CATHY WURZER: I love that. OK. Have a good day today. Thank you.

PAUL HUTTNER: You too. Thanks, Cathy.

CATHY WURZER: That's our chief meteorologist, Paul Huttner.