This summer’s extreme weather has been breaking records.
If you think the weather this summer has been particularly awful, you’re not wrong! With Hurricane Ida dumping half a foot of rainfall on Massachusetts over the last day or two, it’s shaping up to be a particularly rainy summer. In fact, the summer of 2021 has been statistically hotter and wetter than the average Boston summers of years gone by.
As you may recall, the start of the summer was wicked hot. June 2021 recorded the hottest temperatures for the month ever. Boston had 9 days that had 90+ degrees temperatures and two heatwaves. Even the last day of the month was 100-degree day, the first 100+ day in Boston for 10 years.
July brought a wide array of extreme weather conditions, featuring four tropical systems, five tornadoes, and more than 21 inches of rain in Boston. New England hadn’t had a landfalling tropical storm since 2006, but now we’ve had two in the span of about 5 weeks, with Elsa in July and Henri in August. For July and August combined, we’ve had the second-most amount of rainfall for these two months on record.
From the start to the end of summer, New England has gone from concerns about drought to flooding. At the end of June, Boston stood around 4 inches below the average for the year to date. Two months later, Boston now has a whopping foot above the average rainfall to date—enough to perhaps set a record by the end of the year.
Considering that September and October are the peak months for tropical activity, we should definitely expect to be receiving more, too.
[featured image: Pixabay / Jörg Petersen]