It's Summer! Let's talk ICE...

OK not KC ice...this is not a rehash of any KC icestorm...but instead it concerns what's happening up in far northern AK where the ice continues to melt/move away from the coastline as it usually does during this time of the year. Up in Barrow, which is in far northern AK, the temperatures are topping off near 50 or so, they're enjoying 24 hour sunshine (stays that way till 8/3) and the sea ice has finally moved away...take a look at the picture from their webcam...

There is actually a lot of science that goes into all this ice...take a look here if you're interested.

Meanwhile the heat persists in the southern Plains states...last year on this date, Amarillo started to set a 24 hour record for rainfall with close to 7.5" (they had 4.08" on the 8th). This year they've had a whooping 1.4" of precipitation for the entire year!

So you have all that heat sitting there...at some point it's hard to imagine how we can't have some significant heat here...but despite how close it will be, the worst may still be later int he month into AUG...which is typically the hottest time of the year here anyways.

Wichita has had 16 days with temperatures at or above 100 this year including 4 so far this month. So it's there and will at various times over the next 10 vaccinate north and south. Here in the KC area, our temperatures will continue to max out in the mid-upper 90s at their worst we think. We still have lots of greenery out there and the .5-2.5" of rain that we saw on WED won't hurt that cause. Depending on what happens next MON (weak front MAY try to edge into the area) and especially next WED (remnants of some sort of tropical energy move up from the SW) we may have the opportunity to add to the rain gauges...this will then have "green" repercussions on our terrain around these parts again reducing our chances of "officially"
getting towards 100 degrees @ KCI. So basically what we're going to see for the next 7 days is more or less typical KC summer weather with typical KC humidity. WED. potentially, could be a sneakier cool day depending on the timing of the clouds/rainfall. They're may be some heavy downpours IF this disturbance hits us with the right timing and taking advantage of lots of instability.

It does look like that creeping heat will again try and spread northwards towards next weekend, which is what was talked about yesterday.

That's about it for today...have a great weekend!

Joe