We’ve earned this: Summer breezes; D-Day weather forecast saved the world
It's so true. We earn our summers in Minnesota.
My informal, unscientific poll of Minnesotans shows that 96.8% of Minnesotans are loving the year's longest run of warm days so far. The other 3.2% might be living near Lake Superior. I saw 45 degrees at Grand Marais harbor Thursday afternoon. It was 93 in Canby in western Minnesota. That's a 48-degree temperature contrast across the state. Welcome to Minnesota.
So far June is running about 4 degrees warmer than average. Summerlike weather hangs around through Saturday. A modest cool front brings slightly cooler, but still very pleasant air next week.
Cue the temperatures graph.
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Drier skies
Skies stay mostly dry into next week. Our weekend front trigger s a band of showers Saturday night into early Sunday. The sun appears ready to return again by Sunday afternoon to make for a pleasant end to the weekend. Most models keep rainfall totals low through most of next week.
Here's NOAA's GFS model rainfall output through next Friday. Farmers are breathing a little easier.
USA: Wettest 'year' on record
The U.S. has just recorded the wettest 12-month period on record. Studies find when you add 5% more water vapor to a warmer atmosphere, that can supercharge rainfall totals in some storms like Hurricane Harvey by as much as 15 to 30-percent.
We know Minnesota is getting wetter. That signal appears to be unfolding in much of the rest of the nation.
So far 2019 is the 7th wettest year on record in the Twin Cities.
The weather forecast that saved the world
The story behind the meteorologist who made the successful forecast that allowed the D-Day invasion is fascinating and heroic. BBC News has a great write-up.
Stagg felt there was an opportunity for a small ridge of high pressure to be settling in the English Channel the next morning but he was still met with disagreement.
Prof Bentley said it was likely that the German forecasters were also expecting the bad weather to continue and had not expected an invasion under those conditions.
If the D-Day landing had not taken place on 6 June they would have been delayed for two weeks and on that day the Channel was again hit by a large storm, which meteorologists would have struggled to forecast.
Instead, Stagg was proved right and the D-Day invasion went ahead on 6 June, beginning the liberation of German-occupied France, and later Europe, from Nazi control.