It’s officially fall, but it’s not quite sweater weather yet.
Cameron Miller is a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Milwaukee, near Sullivan, Wisconsin.
He says Milwaukee’s summer weather will likely stick around for a while, but the rain from this summer and spring should help keep drought conditions at bay.
Lake Effect’s Xcaret Nuñez spoke with Miller to learn what this warmer-than-usual weather could spell for this winter.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
It was my first summer living in Milwaukee, and it was definitely a muggy one. Why was it so rainy this summer?
Looking at the past observations that we had this summer, we usually run a regional model that does a recap of what happened this past summer, and looking at that, we actually had a stronger jet stream over the upper Midwest. And usually when we have a stronger jet stream, we have more storms and better storm track over the upper Midwest. So that's why we were getting more storms, more rain in the area than we would typically see, or at least in the past years we have seen around here.
Do you know how much more it rained this summer compared to previous years?
Surprisingly, in Milwaukee, we actually ended up right around average for basically the June, July and August period. We usually measure our seasonal normals on a three-month period. So for Milwaukee, we ended up at 11 inches of rain, 11.71, actually, inches of rain, which is about a third of an inch just above what the climate normals are for Milwaukee. But if you look a little bit west, for Madison, there was a lot more rain out there. They got about 20 inches of rain this past summer, which is good for the top five summers for precipitation out here. For Milwaukee, unfortunately, 11 and three-quarter inches is… kind of a typical summer for Milwaukee, but just had a lot of days where we had these piddly showers around, bringing rain chances around. So it seemed like we had a lot of days, but just added up to about normal for Milwaukee.
So, on the bright side, it seems the rain helped drought conditions compared to last year.
So, we've been on a slow improvement basically since October of last year. Looking at the U.S. Drought Monitor, we've basically been improving. We completely wiped out drought from the state from late June into late July, kind of with the precipitation that we had this past summer. So the particularly wet spring that we had helped us get a jump start on that, and then just continuing into the early summer here, especially parts west of Milwaukee, Central Wisconsin into northern Wisconsin, that really helped remove the drought there.
Let's talk about what's going on right now. It's officially fall, but it doesn't really feel like it. Why is it still so warm?
So, what's kind of been happening with the upper-level pattern, we have these things called ridges and troughs in the upper atmosphere. So troughs are usually where the jet stream kind of dips south across the United States, and then a ridge is where the jet stream raises north. So usually, when you are under a ridge, you're gonna have warmer temperatures, and when you are below a trough, you're going to have colder temperatures. So for this past three-week period or so, we've basically had a trough over the western United States and a persistent ridge over the eastern United States. So with that ridge, we've had warmer temperatures coming north, and we've been well above normal, basically in the entire eastern United States here. So Wisconsin's no exception.
Is it normal to be so warm in September?
Not really. The climate normal for Milwaukee, at least this time of year, is right around 73 [degrees]. It's kind of interesting that about this time of year, we start to lose a degree from our normal temperatures about every two to three days. And looking at our normal temperatures, even though we're losing that degree every two to three days, we're staying well above that [73 degrees], especially with the weather pattern that's been going on.
How long do you predict how warm it will be?
So, that's really based on long-term climate models. We rely on the Climate Prediction Center and they do outlooks generally on the one-week period, the two-week period, and then they look at monthly and then three-month outlooks. So the two-week outlook is actually predicting 70 to 80% chances for continuing above normal temperatures. So it looks like we might not see relief from temperatures that are greater than normal going into the latter part of the month here. Granted, that could mean that we’ll drop by the 80s and just still be above that 70-degree climate normal that we’ll be at in Milwaukee later in the month. But it's still looking like we'll be mostly above normal for our temperatures. Then, for our precipitation or rain, it's looking like we're going to be slightly below normal. So they're giving us a 33% chance for below-normal precipitation going into the later part of the month.
So with these warmer-than-usual weather patterns, does this give us any indication of what's to come this winter in Milwaukee?
So that could be variable. Looking at some of the long-term predictions for this winter, we are predicted to go into La Niña conditions. And when we get La Niña conditions, typically over the Upper Midwest, that means that the jet stream, the steering flow for storms in the winter, that'll move a little bit further south, give us a more active pattern and a little bit colder. So we'll have to see just how strong that La Niña gets going into this winter. But long term predictions really predict that this winter will be La Niña that could favor a colder and wetter pattern.
So maybe a little different than last year's Winter.
Yeah, a little bit different. It felt like our winter was just condensed to a two week period. I mean, luckily, I didn't experience that because I was in Mexico. But yeah, it's looking like, especially with that La Niña pattern, we typically get some of our snowier winters around here. So just got to see how it shakes out with time.
