Drought Builds in With No Rain Relief Until Next Week

It is beginning to look a lot like May when it was tough to squeeze out enough rain to just wet the sidewalk. A building drought to our South is actually helping to build a strong ridge of high pressure which is going to bring hot and dry weather here in the Midwest. You can blame the drought cycle. The sun heat's the earth up and evaporates most of its soil moisture. Soil moisture is one of the key ingredients here in the Midwest in helping to fire up pop up thunderstorms. When there is little available soil moisture these storms have a much harder to time developing and literally fizzle. This solidifies the drought cycle. Take a look at it below.

We saw this take place in May as many areas were close to 2 inches below average in rainfall. In June we started off the month promising with near normal rainfall but we are now paying the price for our driest May in 15 years. It just doesn't take much to teeter back in the danger zone of going into a drought. The National Drought Mitigation Center provided this map of showing how serious the situation is becoming.

This drought cycle will only become worse as the summer goes along because of the extremely strong sun angle evaporating at least a .25" of soil moisture a day. So our deficit of almost 3 inches of rain since April 27th is really starting to catch up to us. The abnormally dry soil conditions you see above could likely turn into moderate drought conditions in the next week. We will keep you posted.

Now the good news I like to end my blog with everyday. We all got those weekend plans in and all the June weddings went off without a hitch. No runny mascara or dowpours. I celebrated the good weather forecast by going to Tropicanoe Cove yesterday with my family. Lauren loved going down the Dolphin slide, we all went in the lazy river, and then my daughters talked me into going on the huge waterslide. It was a lot different than the little slide you see below!



I not only had to go down the big slide, but actually do it backwards with no hands. I screamed as the lifeguard pushed me....and then....well I let out an obnoxious scream or two. A fan told me that I screamed so high-pitched that the whole park could hear me. They thought it might have been their little girl or sister. Now do you see why I do not like these hot weather patterns? They only bring trouble. I am still laughing about this. I did not realize I did this as it was all a blur. But I won the respect of my daughters even if I did almost lose an arm. I finally wiped out at the end of the ride as I hit the water. The last time I wiped out that badly I was in the Atlantic Ocean in Florida. It was a fun day. I will definitely be back to do it all over again. I think I had more fun than all the kids. Before I forget, my apologies to those that had to hear me scream. Have a great day. Check in tomorrow to find out what a building La Nina means for our summer weather and how many of you are in fact like me and would rather have a blizzard instead of a heatwave.