The weather blog this morning will be a mish mash of all sorts of weather phenomena, from the searing heat yesterday to the tropics to severe weather...let's start with the searing heat.

It was impressive...KCI hit 107, the hottest since August of 1984...Downtown hit 109! Elsewhere Gardner hit 111 and Topeka hit 112 (record)...Wichita hit 111, Chanute 110 and Salina 109, all new records...Chanute's went back to the dust bowl days. Topeka's 112 was their 4th highest ever recorded and marked the 21st day this year they've been 100 or above (average is about 7). Their highest recorded temperature was 114 set back in 1936. Counting various small stations around the country that report the daily weather, yesterday there were some 133 records broken. However some of these stations have a period of record keeping of "only" 30-40 years which heavily skews the results since the period of time is so short. Once those "shorter" stations are eliminated the numbers come down...first ALL the records...

Now notice what happens when the "shorter" period of record stations are eliminated...

The results are significantly different, with the number of new records down to 39 from 133.

Regardless it was a VERY hot day and one that came close to eclipsing ALL-TIME record highs...

We've been on the edge of the furnace for quite some time, in some sense we've been saved by the extent of the heavy rainfall through the springtime...however it has started to dry out now, and one look around the area reveals, with the exception of N MO that the grasses, trees, landscaping is getting VERY stressed. This cuts down on the evapotranspiration that occurs helping to reduce our dewpoints...but drier air heats up faster and more efficiently than moist humid air...so that combined with a perfect SW to WSW wind yesterday allowed the heat to move in with a vengeance.

What we need to help reduce the temperatures for awhile, and allow things to start greening up again is rainfall...is rainfall and that, while promising is not a slam dunk in our immediate future...latest model data is generating rain but the amoounts are very much in question for the KC metro area...the heaviest may be to our north again, up towards N MO and NE KS...this of course is all very iffy as we'll be tracking various weak disturbances that will running along the periphery of our heat dome that is being shoved off to the SW of the region placing us into a NW Flow, which typically is better for cool fronts to move through and also for rain chances. In these situations during the summer, you can get some real heavy rainfall over a period of time. So the potential is there, whether or not it comes together for areas from KC southwards remains to be seen for now.

Shifting to the tropics, where Emily is churning it's way through the eastern Carribean. It's south of the Dominican Republic now and is maintaining winds of 45-50 MPH. The forecast is for the system to have it's ups and downs for the next couple of days then perhaps intensify as it moves off the SE part of the USA. There is still some model discrepancies so the track heading towards the weekend is still a bit uncertain. Here is the latest from the TPC...

Finally the SPC have come out with their final tornado count for the month of April. The preliminary count was about 860, and we knew that after they went through and eliminated the multiple reports of the same tornados that that number would be lower, the issue was how much lower? The FINAL count was 753, which actually is a bit higher than I though it would be...this though still is easily a record for the most tornados in any month and is almost 4x's higher than the 3 yr average!

Have a great day...you'll notice the humidity much more today compared to yesterday, although the temperatures should be about 15 degrees less hot...still above average though!

joe


adf