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Originally Posted by meteotrade
Good points CLA but I don't agree with your assessment entirely. June 08 will go down in the books as above average temperature wise in NH, and most of the east coast for that matter. Plus I believe we are about to enter a sustained hot pattern for much of the nation, especially the west-central US but probably the NE as well. Although La Nina usually makes for a cool and stormy winter/spring, summer La Ninas are typically warm and dry which is the way we're headed I believe.
I think that part of the perception of cool, wet summers lately comes from skewed recurrences of days gone by; our selective memory recalls the sunny, hot days a lot better than the cool wet ones. (this is the Grandpa principle... "When I was a kid, I used to walk to school in 3 feet of snow in September!") In addition, the late 80s and early 90s featured some anomalously hot/dry summers, which may have established an unrealistic baseline for us when we were younger. I have memories during this period of a lot of sultry, sleepless night in the old uninsulated lake cabin.
I have to keep reminding myself that those years were the exception, not the rule. Although LCI does not have a long term climate history, based on Concord's I would guess extrapolate that average high temp for the lake is about 80 in July and 78 in August. I'd bet that if we had taken a survey, most people would have guessed something much closer to 90.
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I agree with the surface temps being slightly above. My spring temps this year were slightly above what they were last year. When I said "pattern" I was thinking on a North America scale and to some extent, a vertical space.
N. America... This past spring I kept seeing features on the maps that were more common of winter, such as the big troughs we saw in the jet stream over the east, the persistent low pressure systems parking over Quebec and funneling NW flow at us, and in technical discussions from NOAA that often mentioned features more typical of winter than summer.
Vertical space... we've had a lot of severe weather popping this spring, and one of the prime ingredients we need for that is cold air aloft, creating a huge difference between down here and up there so that the warmth down here will be inclined to rise. The cold air aloft has made its effects known all across the country this spring. One of those effects is thunderstorms with hail. They have a hard time occurring where the freezing level is extremely high up from the ground.
This month I did notice CPC is going for better chances of above normal temps next 14 days, although that forecast changes more often than the wind on the lake. For Summer as a whole, they have been steadily predicting above-normal temps, which are in accordance with your forecast and also a discussion from a couple of the climate bloggers. Their reasoning was the warmth & cold in the Pacific were shifting around a little which should result in a different North American pattern the next few weeks.
I haven't had time to check that info out yet but I wouldn't mind a few steady weeks of summer for a change. Seems like it's taken forever to get the lake to warm up this spring... I had a quite shivery swim in it just last week - would estimate mid-60s for water temp (
my water temp monitor along with some other equipment is still out of service following the storm of 6/22... one forum member suggested I solicit donations as others have done for cams... so I will start another thread on that this week. In the meantime I may start taking water temp readings the old fashioned way and post that whenever I think of it.)