It will feel like summer for a minute!
Update #706: The Hudson Valley will be riding a weather roller coaster this week.
Ready for some hot and humid weather?
Perhaps you’ve been ready since the snowy days of January and February. Or perhaps you’re not ready at all.
Either way, it’s coming. But this summer-like weather won’t signal a sustained shift toward high heat in the Hudson Valley.
If you’re wondering when that shift will come, stay tuned for my Hudson Valley summer outlook. It’s coming out next weekend, just for premium subscribers. Feel free to click the button below to receive it.
This week, there could be more than a 50-degree difference between peak temperatures on Tuesday afternoon and low temperatures on Friday morning 😵💫
The week ahead
The region will say hello and then goodbye to summer weather in a matter of days.
Monday: July-like weather 🌡️
Tuesday: like Monday, but hotter and becoming more humid; a stray late-day shower or storm can’t be ruled out 🌡️🌡️
Wednesday: hot and humid once again; a PM cold front will probably bring showers and storms and cool things off 🌡️
Thursday: much cooler with clouds and sun
Friday: a cool morning; plenty of sunshine
Saturday-Sunday: the sun might depart in time for the weekend as rain chances increase 🤦♂️
Looking ahead to the week of May 25, sustained high heat looks unlikely. The week could start unsettled before turning drier.
I’ll have more to say about summer patterns in my report next week. Consider upgrading your subscription to receive it.
Tales from 150 years ago
I’ve been writing quite a bit about a potentially intense El Niño forming in the Pacific Ocean this year that’s expected to have wide-reaching weather impacts. I’ll have more to say about what this means for the Hudson Valley in my summer outlook.
This past week, I wrote a story that looked back at a devastating El Niño event in 1877-78 that contributed to global population losses of 3 to 4 percent.
Here’s a gift link.
It was a popular piece that generated some interesting discussions.
I was surprised to receive an email from a New Yorker whose grandmother had shared an account of this event from long ago with her.
She wrote that her grandmother’s brother was probably a casualty of the El Niño event, succumbing to “summer complaint” in the summer of 1878 — probably from tainted cow’s milk that had been kept only in a shed for cooling.
Then, a decade later, during the super El Niño of 1888, her grandmother recalled sledding in June in Ulster County, New York!
There was a historic blizzard in March of that year — the Great Blizzard of 1888 — that produced widespread snowfall of 30 to 50 inches in the Northeast, with drifts reportedly reaching 30 to 40 feet. In Ulster County, wagons that had collected the snow dumped it into local ravines, she wrote.
Because of a cool spring that year, big piles in these shady hollows lasted for months. That’s what brought the now unfathomable opportunity to sled in early summer in the Hudson Valley.
This week’s weather is a piece of cake compared to all of that! ✌️