A cold front passed off the coastline early on Saturday leaving all of Maine a wonderfully dry day with a warm breeze. This weather will continue into the overnight hours with clear skies and comfortably cool readings for sleeping.

Many areas still need rain and although there were some showers and thunderstorms with the passage of the cold front, many areas are still running enough of a water deficit to call this a moderate drought. This is especially true in parts of York and Cumberland Counties.

I like to mention the rain issue because although it’s very nice weather to be outside, gardeners and farms would love some rain.

June Warmth
Temperatures will be running seasonably warm over the next several days, with a cooler day on Monday due to a prevalence of clouds and the chance of some much needed rainfall.

There will be another chance of showers sometime around the 18th as a frontal system impacts the region.
I think the bigger thing to watch this week is going to be some excessive rain over Texas from a tropical system. This system, which will be of tropical origin, may or may not be named, but will bring an awful lot of rain to east Texas in areas which don’t need it.

While June started quite cool, May was very warm and warmer than average conditions look to continue for much of the upcoming forecast period. According to Joe Bastardi of WeatherBell Analytics, this summer’s pattern is very similar to the one back in 1957.

That year in southern Maine brought a warmer than average June, but then the rest of the summer was more typical with some cool periods in both July and August. Remember, cooler than average in summer is still warm. If the average high temperature is 80 degrees and it’s cooler than average it still can be in the upper 70s.

Analog Years
The reason we look backwards to help understand what the weather will be in the future is patterns repeat. This past winter was a good match for 1976-77 and 1977-78 and indeed the winter was similar. There are many, many, many variables that help create our weather each year. Once of the bigger players in the type of summer and winter we have each year is El Nino. Year’s with an El Nino in the stage like the one we are currently in, bring about similar weather for certain regions of the country and globe.

These patterns are of course not exact matches. There are way too many variables, but they do help us gauge the type of summer we might have.

After seeing how closely June is on target to match 1957, I decided to plot the average temperature for 1957 for July and August. Notice on the map below the temperatures are below average for this 8 week period, a turnaround from June of that same year.

While this doesn’t mean July and August couldn’t be above average, it is once piece of compelling data indicating the warm temperature regime we have experienced the past 6 weeks might not last through the entire summer. The weather is expect to remain warm over the next 6 to 10 days. Check out the map below from NOAA.

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