Dry, dry June and uncommonly hot

By Jim Bradshaw
jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net

You've probably noticed that this has been one of the driest and hottest Junes in a while.

In fact, in some places in southwest Louisiana it may be the driest June ever.

As I write this on Thursday, there has not been a drop of rain measured at the rice experiment station near Crowley since less than a tenth of an inch fell there on May 25.

Likewise, the gauge at the Lake Charles airport has been bone dry since May 26.

The R&D Research Farm on La. 103 midway between Washington and Port Barre measured a sprinkling of rain on June 3 and just a tiny bit on June 4, but nothing since. A little bit of rain fell those two days at the Lafayette airport also, but nothing has been measured there for the rest of the month.

Acadiana Regional airport at New Iberia has measured only 0.13 of an inch for the month of June, and all of that in the first week of the month.

The other gauges across south Louisiana report pretty much the same story.

The culprit has been a ridge of high pressure that parked itself several weeks ago in the Gulf of Mexico and has effectively blocked the cool and moist Gulf winds that usually flow over Acadiana.

It will eventually move out, but there's nothing working to push it away right now, and it could stay in place for the rest of the month.

That could set up record-breaking weather.

I don't have monthly all-time records for all of Acadiana, but do know that the five driest Junes over more than a century of measurement in Lafayette were in 1979 (0.04 inches), 1930 (0.36), 1969 (0.53), and 1907 and 1944 (0.76 each).

Kent Kuyper of the Lake Charles weather office tells me that the driest June ever in Lake Charles came during the dust bowl year of 1936 (0.02).

All of this dry weather has also meant hot days, with actual temperatures in the 90s practically every day, and Heat Indices well over 100. Lafayette, New Iberia, and Alexandria broke records with 102-degree heat on Wednesday and forecasters see hotter days ahead.

The utility companies are beginning to worry about keeping the grid going, and the rest of us worry about what the utility bill is going to be at the end of the month.

The hottest single June day ever recorded in Lafayette was on June 27, 1930, when the thermometer rose to 106 degrees. The day before, June 26, was 104 degrees and the afternoon high was 100 degrees or more for seven of the last ten days of the month,. It was 99 on two of the days that it did not make it to 100 that year.

The record for month-long heat at Lafayette was set in 1953, when the average temperature for the month was 83.9 degrees (which compares to a norm of just a bit over 80 degrees). In June 1953, Lafayette sweated through temperatures of 95 degrees or higher on 26 of the 30 days of the month.

This year's hot and dry weather means that much of south Louisiana has been placed in what the weather service calls a "moderate" drought, and which those of us trying to grow tomatoes call "water early and water often" weather.

Of course, this isn't completely unusual weather here. By the end of June 1960, 32 south Louisiana parishes had been declared an agricultural disaster area because of a drought that started in April.

And, of course, we also get the opposite extreme, such as in 2001, when Lafayette measured nearly 20 inches of rain for the single month - more than some western states get in a whole year.