The Weather Month In Review: July

The brains at WxOrNotBG have recently brought you a weekly post called, “The Weather Week In Review”, and we’ll highlight the major events from across the state during the past week. Well, at the end of each month, we’ll be doing a, “Weather Month In Review” reviewing the past month, the coolest stuff, etc.

The previous weeks of July are here:

Both the beginning and the end of the month were rather quiet, with temperatures being mostly seasonable and rainfall not occurring too much. However, the weeks and days in between were just crazy. I mean crazy…..

…..Crazy monotonous. For a large chunk of July, we saw a rinse-and-repeat pattern, with extremely hot temperatures, high dewpoints, storms and then two days of cooler weather.

There were points where it was so monotonous that forecasting for 7 days in advance would become somewhat predictable. I mean, summer time patterns are generally fairly simple forecasts, but when you get the same thing over and over it just gets annoying.

I will say, the worst weather did occur during the first couple weeks. The 7 day timespan from July 7th through July 14th was one of the craziest since the February week from hades. This state was repeatedly assaulted by squall lines, wind damage, and heavy rainfall.

The lines of storms that moved through the OH Valley left behind over 400,000 lightning strikes since Monday! @spann pic.twitter.com/EwmuhCxdZd

— Ed Vallee (@EdValleeWx) July 15, 2015

The NWS Precipitation Analysis data is nothing short of impressive for Central & #EKY. #kywx #ekywx pic.twitter.com/5cB2NUXobh — Chris Johnson (@chriswymt) July 23, 2015

We had 5 days of severe weather within that one week timespan across the state, and there were days and days in a row with rainfall over the same regions. This led to water totals adding up in the inches most days, as the atmosphere was incredibly humid every single days. To further those pains, we would have rounds of damaging winds impact the region on all of these days.

The culmination of all of this was on July 13th & 14th. A shortwave was riding southeastward out of southern Canada, and this would impact parts of our state in an incredible manner. On July 13th, there was a moderate risk of severe storms issued for the majority of the region, heightening the senses of meteorologists across the area.

The initial round of storms rolled south-southeastward out of the Great Lakes region around midday, leaving a wide swath of damaging winds across the majority of central and eastern KY.

@NWSLouisville Versailles a Road in lex. Amazing structure pic.twitter.com/TFvTFMTMqM

— Pierce Larkin (@pierce_larkin) July 13, 2015

In eastern KY, the biggest issue became flooding from both days. They had 4 rounds of heavy rainfall drench the region with water, creating significant flash flooding issues across much of the areas. The main reason this was able to happen was because the atmosphere had days in advance to pile up moisture. This created an atmosphere readily able to destabilize quickly, even after thunderstorms. One county was hit particularly hard in the state, though. Johnson County in eastern KY was hit almost ridiculously hard by rainfall. What had happened was the wave of thunderstorms moved into the region, but the initial line began to give its surge of outflow. This helped to created a newer, stronger and more organized line of convection ahead of it. During the congealing phase, the storms were able to train and dump rainfall.

What is incredible is that at one point, the county was seeing 6-7″ per hour rainfall rates. That is almost certainly going to create dangerous and deadly flash flooding across the region. This same area seemed to be pummeled repeatedly for several days, and the month as a whole. Eastern Kentucky saw areas see rainfall totals end at up to 300% of their normal July rainfall. Some of the statewide totals include:

8.87″ in Jackson, KY

11.23″ in London, KY (wettest July on record)

11.02″ in Frankfort, KY (wettest July on record)

9.66″ in Lexington, KY

6.17″ in Bowling Green, KY

10.42″ in Paducah, KY

Those rainfalls, especially when considering that the month of July averages for rainfall in most locales across the state are under 5″, are almost absurd. We had so much rain at the beginning of the month, and there were just times where it really did feel like it wasn’t going to stop.

But it did, luckily. The last few weeks of the month were overall fairly boring as a whole. We didn’t see too many severe weather events by the end of the month. We saw the typical, small storm events, but nothing like what we saw to open the month. The fronts got weaker, but moisture was always in abundance by the end of the month. The biggest story to close out the month was easily the heat and humidity. The beginning of the month had more humidity than it did heat, but by the end of the month, we were seeing typical July heat. Temperatures were hitting the mid and upper 90s, with dewpoints occasionally reaching the 80s, which is crazy anytime of year and at any spot.

Ooof, 81 dew point here at the office. May go out and sling to see how accurate the Davis is. #kywx

— Mark J. ⚡️ (@MJ33Wx) July 29, 2015

Parts of the state were under heat advisories at least twice; however, the heat didn’t last more than 3 days at the most. We would have a cold front sweep through, with scattered storms announcing their arrival. They would always be followed by cooler air, and somewhat heavenly conditions. This made the month somewhat bearable across most of the state.

Top Weather Buzz posts from July:

Be sure to check those out. We have some awesome weather minds here for WxOrNot, and they are all creative and great writers. Definitely go look through the weather buzz section anytime you need a weather nerd fill!

Well, next week we will get back into another “Weather Week In Review” post. Until then, I hope that August is at least a little bit quieter than July was!