Welcome to the Dog Days of Summer...they officially started today and linger through August 11th. It seems as if the forecast is going along those lines with no extreme heat for the week but lots of sweating heat heading this way with a boatload of 80s and 90s in the forecast for quite some time.

Before I get to the weather, which is not been easy to figure out these last couple of days...take a look at what some thunderstorms did last night in Overland Park. In addition to torrential rainfall, hail ranging from pea to quarter sized fell in parts of JOCO. There was an area though up towards 103rds and Mastin that saw even larger hail...upwards of the size of eggs...no doubt there was significant car damage in that area from some of these hail stones. My thanks to Brian Stertz for sending in these pictures of the hail generated by the storm...very impressive! The storms continuously developed along a northward moving outflow boundary that was fueled by storms well south of KC yesterday PM.  Typically these scenarios fade away with the setting sun and a stabilizing atmosphere. That happened last night, but not until about midnight. Before then the storms just kept regenerating in small areas. Where they formed they quickly became, mostly, heavy rain producers and small hail generators. Leave it to the one storm that generated a stronger updraft and created a small pocket of significantly larger hailstones though.

If you remember, the other day I alerted you to changes to the way the climate numbers were going to be portrayed. This involves the updating of what we call the 30 year means. I'm sure 30 years was picked for some reason, but I never really understood why data is limited to 30 years. We have some 100+ years of, we think, reliable data for KC. Why not use all of it...why just 30 years. Perhaps it's to portray changes that are thought to occur in a shorter "climate" period...never understood why they do it that way...but they always have. Perhaps it because equipment changes or site locations may change...the "official" KC weather site has changed almost half a dozen times over our 120+ years of records. Anyway the folks @ Pleasant Hill have come up with how these changes are going to be reflected into our numbers that we use for the monthly data...the link is here. In a nutshell...our annual averages for temperatures are going up about .5 degrees. The snowfall average will drop from 20.1 to 18.8"/year and the precipitation average will increase about 1" to 38.85".

OK onto our weather which is messy to say the least. I had a feeling that radar would be active today, and it has been, especially for N MO. Here are the doppler estimated rainfall totals for the day (thru 1PM) thus far...unfortunately the core of the heaviest rain is again up across N MO...

Some of that heavy stuff fell along the MO River watershed, so while the river continue to slowly recede from it's crest for all the stations from KC northwards, this may slow that receding a bit. By the way...I thought the KC star did a real nice article about the complexities that confound the Army Corps Of Engineers regarding the river situations...take a look here.

There is another wave that is moving across E KS now that's producing additional areas of rain and thunder. It shouldn't last for that long but will be a factor through the middle of the afternoon...then we should break out into sunshine. Temperatures will be all over the place, not surprisingly. We made it into the upper 70s, cooled to 70 now are bouncing back upwards. There are some 80-83 degree temperatures being reported on the south side as I type...and those too will bounce up then down this PM.

I don't really trust any of the model data, in terms of resolving our rainfall chances for the next 5 days. They simply will be able to generate general ideas of precipitation placement...and while the precip may exist it's location will probably be wrong by hundreds of miles in some cases. They models will do better with the upper levels so I'll be relying on that data to make a forecast.

Have a great rest of the weekend...right now I think the fireworks tonight should be OK for the Riverfest in the downtown area. This last wave coming through this afternoon should leave an area of sinking air behind it...so we should stabilize somewhat after 4-5PM or so...I think!

Joe