This dehydrated July was one of very few

You can almost hear the ground gasping with a slow, agonizing, parched voice, pleading for some water. A bit dramatic, I guess. Certainly, it has been dry around and in the Coulee. There were some recent isolated showers here and there, nothing to have any real effect. My home weather station hasn’t recorded any precipitation for 59 days as of this writing. Feast or famine, they say.

For the month of July, I’ve measured two days exceeding the 100˚F mark — on the 6th, at 101.7˚F, and on the 7th, with 103.8˚. The low for the month was on the 16th at 52.8˚. The mean for this July was 77.5˚, making it 4.5˚ above our all-time mean of 73.0˚. All of the highest temperatures recorded for July were in the early years of our official record keeping — 1935-108˚, 1936-108˚, 1937-106˚, 1938-109˚, 1939-113˚, 1940-104˚ and 1941-109˚. From 1942 on, recorded high temperatures seem to have moderated just bit, though as stated, some of our monthly means are going up. That means generally higher temperature throughout the month.

Our mean precipitation for July is 0.47 inches. I’ve already pointed out that we had zero precipitation this July. Here’s a rundown on years when July was totally dry: 1943, 1960, 1968, 2003 and 2017, according to Coulee Dam 1 SW, National Weather Service, Spokane.

I recently came across an interesting article about World War I and how it changed weather forecasting. The change that occurred to weather forecasting was a dramatic turn, from looking at repeated weather patterns in the past, to a mathematical model that looked at an open future. Wartime calls for reliable and accurate forecasting. There was no dependability in weather forecasting that focused on the needs of aviation, ballistics and, as it was prevalent in WWI, the drifting of poisonous gases.

Daily weather maps and weather warnings generally worked; there was the telegram that did move quicker than weather systems. Change did come, and it came with the work of an Englishman named Lewis F. Richardson. Richardson noted that a weather forecast was nothing more than archival in nature, simply matching weather patterns currently observed to past historical records of previous weather. Richardson saw the lack of science in that method of forecasting and started to experiment, making a numerical forecast based on scientific laws.

The Norwegian meteorologist, Vilhelm Bjerknes, had recorded the initial set of specific weather data used by Richardson, which he modeled into a mathematical weather forecast. Richardson completed some painstakingly complex work, using a grid map for the whole of Europe. It took six weeks to calculate a six-hour forecast for a single location, work that took longer to calculate than the weather it was calculating took to happen. It was all a failure because the forecast was simply wrong.

By the 1940s, Lewis F. Richardson’s mathematical experiment and approach to weather forecasting was totally vindicated. The first digital computers arrived and were known as “probability machines.” Their speedy forecasting calculations brought forth a new era in meteorology.

Looking skyward, please read the article I wrote about the coming solar eclipse that will occur on Monday morning, Aug. 21. There are safety tips on viewing the eclipse with the proper eyewear.