Last month will go down as one of the wettest for the month of July as nearly 12 inches of rain fell at the RadioOnTheGo studios in Hampton.
RadioOnTheGo Meteorologist Dan Holiday, also president of The Storm Report, says there were a few factors that led to such a wet month.
“The Gulf of Mexico really opened up a lot with moisture coming up there from the south and obviously influencing the central part of the country. And the other component you need is the jet stream. The jet stream typically moves a little bit further north and it’s a lot closer to Iowa this time of year. And so what winds up happening is we have storm systems that winds up coming in from the west. They get caught up in the jet stream and they come on through. Some years, they get pushed a little bit further north of us and some years a little bit further south of us. You almost look at it like a railroad. We were right along the train tracks of one storm system after another and they just continued to come in and because of that we had abundant moisture to deal with and a lot of rainfall. So it was just far more active this year than it typically is.”
In July 2024, 6.83 inches of rain was recorded at the studios in Hampton, and in July 2023, just 1.63 inches of rain was recorded.
Elsewhere on the weather front, cooler temperatures moved into the area late this past week, and along with that, came more smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Holiday says the hazy skies will continue through late this weekend.
“What’s happened is, is we had this cooler Canadian frontal boundary move through. The good news is it gave us some break from the extreme heat. The downside is we have high pressure over the upper Midwest and the high pressure systems, they turn like a clock, clockwise to the right. And so what they do is they bring in that air, cooler air from Canada and that also is where the wildfires are going on and because the wildfires are there that brings the smoke down with it and that’s what’s causing it to come from Canada further south into Iowa and it’s making those skies very hazy from time to time.”
The average high temperature in Hampton for July was 84 degrees, the average low was 65. The highest temperature was 92 degrees, recorded July 4th.
Full interview with Dan Holiday below;
