Ticker for July 25, 2003

                
MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ...
July 25, 2003      July 25, 2003      July 25, 2003      July 25, 2003


More Dryspell Stuff

Summer dryspells in Oklahoma almost invariably come hand-in-hand with
heat waves, and 2003 has behaved accordingly.  The following graphic
shows the number of days above 100F since June 15th, which is roughly
when the significant rain stopped for most of us:



The largest numbers in north-central Oklahoma show a combination of
two factors that support very high afternoon temperatures:  lack of
moisture and bare soil.  A map of rainfall deficit in the past
30 days shows a large lobe of puny rainfall in north-central Oklahoma:



This north-central lobe fits almost perfectly onto the northern half
of Oklahoma's winter wheat belt.  After harvest, the bare fields often
become a hotbed of surface temperatures, as they are somewhat darker
than the surrounding native vegetation (for the same reason, they also
become a hotbed for entertaining dust devils, too!).  Throw in a
significant lack of moisture, and there's not much left for solar
energy to do but drive afternoon temperatures up.


Snow, in July???

If you get the Ticker by e-mail, you might have noticed the snowfall
"records" recently have been above-zero.  In fact, at the bottom of
this message, you should see record "snow" at Blackwell, Jefferson
and Poteau today.

As you may have guessed, this isn't snowfall.  It's actually hailfall.
For a few periods in this country's climate record, all frozen precip
(snow, sleet, hail) was recorded as "snow".  Thankfully, that's not
the practice now, but it happened enough times to pop up in summer
records.

The Ticker Programming Team will eventually weed these erroneous
"snow" events from the daily Tickers.