When Wichita set a record for most rain in a 24-hour period in mid-September, an already wet year took on historic proportions.
A slow-moving boundary tapped into the remnants of Tropical Storm Lowell on September 12, dumping 10.31 inches of rain on Wichita. Another half-inch fell two days later, pushing the city’s total for the year beyond 46.6 inches.
That was less than 4 inches from the wettest year ever in Wichita - 50.48 inches in 1951 - with more than three months still to go in 2008. A new record was a sure thing, right?
Not so fast. Since then, the skies have shut off. Little more than .02 of an inch has been recorded since then. I rather doubt anyone’s complaining, though - especially those with flooded basements or overwhelmed sump pumps. The region desperately needed to dry out.
While twisters are much more uncommon in Europe than they are in the Great Plains of the United States, they do occur now and then.
A tornado killed three people in the town of Hautmont in northern France on Aug. 4, and another tornado hit Mykanow, Poland on Aug. 15, killing three and injuring 37.
Imagine the public outcry if a tornado took out the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Piazza San Marco in Venice……
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday signed a State of Disaster Emergency for 11 Kansas counties affected by severe storms, heavy rains and flooding that began Sept. 11.
The counties named in the declaration are Anderson, Butler, Chase, Cowley, Greenwood, Harper, Harvey, Lyon, Russell, Sedgwick, and Sumner.
“Although people often think of tornadoes as the big destructive force of nature in Kansas, floods can be just as damaging, if not more so,” Sebelius said. “While tornadoes are generally limited in scope, floods affect many, many square miles, destroying or damaging roads, bridges, power lines and other vital infrastructure.”
Local damage assessments are continuing and federal assistance may be requested as the damage total rises.
The Eagle’s story earlier this week about the bountiful local apple harvest inspired reflection about how the weather impacts our lives in ways so many of us never realize.
The story talked about how the freeze that killed the blossoms last year - and thus the harvest - set the stage for this season’s abundance. Not growing apples last year gave trees the strength to produce an extra large crop this season.
Remember the massive blizzard that paralyzed huge portions of western Kansas late in 2006 and early in 2007? Some residents of rural areas went several weeks without electricity and livestock suffered terribly. But that same storm brought desperately needed moisture to the region, as the snow and ice slowly melted, and crops flourished in the growing seasons that followed.
I find myself wondering how this incredibly wet spring and summer will impact the region not just the rest of this year, but next growing season as well.
Crisp nights, warm days — autumn has dawned in classic fashion around the region.
I love it.
Yet I actually heard someone complaining about the weather last week on a warm sunny day, and it wasn’t a person on one of those tornado-chasing tours that swarm the Midwest in the spring and early summer. Frankly, I felt bad for them if they couldn’t find pleasure in sunny skies and temperatures in the low 80s.
Some may consider this steady diet of sunshine and highs in the 70s and 80s dull, since we’ve had a couple of weeks of it. But I’m relishing it for more than one reason. The first is obvious - it’s simply gorgeous weather. The second is that Kansas weather is so often a yo-yo of extremes, so for a consistent pattern to settle in is noteworthy. When that pattern is this beautiful, it’s even better.
So other folks may fuss and fret, but I’m just going to enjoy it.
The sky smiled on Cambridge, England, on Sept. 14 — in the form of what some are calling an upside-down rainbow.
Jacqueline Mitton, an astronomer who captured the phenomenon on camera, said it was caused by ice crystals high in the atmosphere that reflected light back up into the sky, The (London) Daily Telegraph reported.
Mitton, 60, said she’s never seen anything like it before.
I spotted a photo at the Web site Zeitgeist.
After looking at the photo, Brad Ketcham of the National Weather Service in Wichita told me the phenomenon is not a rainbow but an atmospheric “halo” or a “sun dog” - a circular reflection of ice crystals.
“It’s just a more vibrant one. Usually, sun dogs or halos are not that bright.”
A rainbow is caused by light reflecting off of raindrops, while sun dogs are caused by light reflecting off ice crystals, Ketcham said. Nonetheless, “I can see why people are calling it a rainbow.”
For a reference point, here is a photograph of a halo taken at Table Mountain in California by a NASA employee in 1990.
The Discovery Channel will feature another Wichita resident in its broadcast of the show “Planet Earth” at 7 p.m. today: Jim Reed, a severe weather photographer and storm chaser.
Reed told me he’ll be talking about severe weather in cut-ins that follow commercial breaks in the rebroadcast of the BBC series.
…but this time it’s not in Wichita.
More than 10 inches of rain fell in Gove County over about a 5-hour period Wednesday, but no tropical storm or hurricane is to blame.
“It was a crazy amount of rain,” Mick McGuire, a senior meteorologist with the Goodland office of the National Weather Service, told me.
A resident who lives four miles southeast of Grainfield in Gove County recorded 10.6 inches of rain, and a nearby neighbor reported 11 inches. To put those totals in perspective, they surpass even the 10.31 inches of rain that fell on Wichita over a 24-hour period on Sept. 12.
A cluster of thunderstorms developed along a warm front, McGuire said, and as they moved east new storms would develop along the same line. It’s a pattern known as “training” - storms following the same line like railroad cars on a track - and it can lead to substantial amounts of rain falling in a small area.
Remarkably, no flash flooding was reported as a result of the heavy rain.
“It was a pretty small area,” McGuire said, comparing it to “a bullseye” on radar. You can see that in the radar image below.
Rainfall totals from Wednesday in northwest Kansas
The National Weather Service now warns that isolated thunderstorms are possible in the region, and some of the storms could produce dime-sized hail and winds of up to 50 miles an hour.
The storms will be widely scattered, forecasters say - but don’t be surprised if something fires up.
So I glanced at the 7-day outlook for Wichita on the National Weather Service’s web site, and it featured the same forecast for most of the next week: Sunny, with highs in the mid-80s.
It reminded me of an old meteorology joke, where a forecaster went to his psychologist and said, “I’m having the same nightmare over and over: The forecast every day is ‘Sunny, high 85′”
But I’m not about to complain about such nice weather in a region more used to another old joke: “If you don’t like the weather, just wait 5 minutes.”
