Spoiler alert: I am going to talk about weather data in this post. That may be boring for some, but it is my favorite topic. Specifically, I will be looking at rainfall this year starting with July. We know it has been relatively dry this season, and the Drought Monitor for Colorado reflects this:
We here in Boulder County are in the D0 – Abnormally Dry – category, which is actually better than much of the rest of the state. Extreme drought is keeping a firm grip over the southern portion of the state.
How does 2020 rank in terms of precipitation. Let’s start by comparing July 2020 with previous years:
This shows July 2020 as being the 9th driest in my 10 years of data. If you do the math our average July precip is 3.48 inches. That means the July 2020 rain total was 2.11 inches below normal. Yuck.
But we did have a wet June. What if we look at the June, July precipitation combined?
This is a little better with a two month total of 3.74 inches making 2020 the 4th driest year in my records.
It gets worse if we look back at April, May, June, and July:
2020 is in last place for April, May, June, July precipitation. It is less than half of 2015’s total.
If we look at the total so far for the entire year:
We find that 2020 is the second driest year in my records, ringing in at 2.87 inches below a normal of 15.24 inches.
Over the past several days we have been under a north/northwesterly flow regime as we remain sandwiched between a hot ridge over the Southwest and a cooler trough in the central and eastern parts of the country. This has resulted in almost daily rainfall here in Nederland along with cooler temperatures. We have even had nocturnal (night-time) thunderstorms. Here are my observerations over the past 5 days:
Monday, July 27: 74 F, 46 F P: 0 in.
Tuesday, July 28: 75 F, 51 F, P: 0 in.
Wednesday, July 29: 79 F, 50 F, P: 0 in.
Thursday, July 30: 70 F, 46 F, P: 0.43 in.
Friday, July 31: 74 F, 46 F, P: 0.04 in.
Saturday, August 1: 77 F, 48 F, P: 0.21
The daily chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms will continue through much of this week in Nederland along with comfortable temperatures:
