Where's the summer rain: Are we in a drought or is it just another Pittsburgh summer?
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - It's hot, it's been dry, the grass is dry, is this the apocalypse?
Is it global warming or is it just summer in Pittsburgh?
It's time to go find some answers.
So, let's look at this in two ways - heat and wet.
We'll start with my conversation about the heat with the chief severe weather forecaster for the National Weather Service Pittsburgh, Fred McMullen.
Even if you love the heat of this summer sun, you have to admit it's been pretty doggone hot.
"We're still below average for the number of 90-degree days this summer - across the Pittsburgh region," he said.
We only have a couple, usually about seven, but we aren't anywhere near the record.
"Back in the summer of 1988, we had almost 35 days when the temperature was ninety degrees or higher, which is the biggest heatwave Pittsburgh has seen since records began," McMullen explained.
Then there was 1995, McMullen said we hit 90 degrees 24 times or greater at Pittsburgh International Airport.
So 2022 is hardly moving the heat meter.
"June and July, the temperature departure from normal this is calculating all the average highs, the average all the high temperatures all the low temperatures have only been about a degree and a half above average," he said.
Which, he explained, is 83 degrees. Hot, yes, but if someone tells you "I remember when you could scramble an egg on the bricks on Grant Street," they actually probably do!
Just not this year.
Now, it's a small consolation when we're sweating the way we are - but the grass remains brown, the flowers need to be watered, so how bad of a drought are we in?
We're wondering where the summer rain is, and thinking these conditions must mean we're in a drought...but are we?
"We get a couple of days of rain you know you'll be surprised how fast the grass can kind of regurgitate and go from dormant to an actual living state," McMullen said. "With the rain we had this past weekend. we are back above average for the year for precipitation across Pittsburgh, you know nearly an inch above average."
McMullen explained that this is our rainy season with 35-percent of our annual rainfall coming in June, July, and August.
"That's because again if it's humid you have thunderstorms, and higher rain rates, which leads to greater precipitation totals," he said.
We've seen some wet summers, with four of the wettest years on record happening since 1990 in 2018 and 2019, those are first and third, respectively.
Remember all of those landslides? That's what makes this year more average...with one deviation.
"Our overnight lows are getting warmer," McMullen said. "So we're having more days when low overnight lows are 70 or greater than we had in the past."
That causes higher humidity levels and that in turn keeps us out of the triple-digit range of temperatures.
Does climate change play a role in all of this?
McMullen said it's hard to tie any of it directly to climate change because it spikes and then drops. The rainfall is often tied to whether tropical weather comes into play, like Hurricanes Francis and Ivan, to name a couple.
