Oops, I see I accidentally posted this to Hot Topics (had intended it for TREES), as I intended a horticultural perspective. But I will leave it hear and post one on the TREE forum as well.

Yeah, it is pretty ridiculous, as with the exception of a brief heat wave in June, this has been an unusually cool summer..........temps seldom exceeding the low 70's. And you are correct - few people have any AC in their homes. That is typically restricted to offices and business establishments. And cars :-))

We tend to be heat sissies up here! Anything above 85F causes consternation in most and we are looking at at least of week of high temps, possibly even record breaking highs. Fortunately, I live a block off the Sound and in the woods, so it will be several degrees cooler in my immediate area than it will be even a couple of miles inland.

It is also important to note that it is also very dry. This a recurring summer drought area and this is the height of our dry season. But it has been even drier than usual and we have had no measurable precipitation for 46 days and we are entering what has historically been the driest week in our climate year. As NO rain is predicted during this heat wave and for at least the next 7-10 days, we are about to break a record for number of consecutive days without rainfall. Fire danger is extremely high.

Unfortunately, scheduled business appointments will have me out driving around the countryside on two of the hottest days. The dog, who typically accompanies me in the car on these travels, will be staying home :-)

I watered most of the garden heavily yesterday and will tackle the rest today. As I garden heavily with containers, they need almost daily attention. But maybe I'll finally get a few tomatoes to ripen out of all this heat!!

Actually it is normal for the rainfall in Britain to be distributed evenly throughout the year. The year my mother went there she came back with photos of brown lawns like we see every summer here in the Seattle area. She was told this was due to a 100 year drought being in effect in the London area for instance. It's not usual to install irrigation systems in the UK and on those previously rare occasions when summers are not rainy there garden plants may be lost.

Awhile back the long term - as in decades - UW climate center projection for western WA was colder and darker springs followed by markedly hot summer periods. This was supposed to have manifested fully by about 2050 I think it was. But as with other changes in climates occurring these days it seems to have been kicking in noticeably already.

Also if it becomes like Portland here that will just be a recurrence of previous norms. It will have to become more extreme than Portland in Seattle before it is something entirely new. Right now the relationship is that winters are somewhat colder and summers somewhat hotter down there. To illustrate last time I looked the Portland airport had records over 100 and below 0 whereas the Sea-Tac spread was 0 to 100. However the UW weather station (inside Seattle proper) got a reading over 100 a few years ago. Perhaps heralding a change.

Amazing the differences. I can see the troubles when labeling things as "full sun" or drought tolerant when you ship nationwide.

For example 2012 was the hottest and dryest I can remember and none of the properly developed suburbs around here (st louis metro is 99% suburbs) had water restrictions.

A couple of the shouldn't have been developed well water suburbs did if I recall. Normally our problem is welfare for builders and land inheritors flood plain developement.

We have extreme drought in Sweden as well but at least not a 100-110F heat wave. I can hardly imagine what that would be like. Our climate is very close to that Gardegal describes, 85F for more than a few days will release a heat alert. Almost noone have AC in their homes and I don't even have it in my car. But it isn't hot this summer, just bone dry and windy.

This has been a fairly normal Summer in NJ after a wet Spring and the the two- year drought definitely seems to have ended. Temps not bad but July was excessively humid. For YEARS, season after season, I felt every season was somehow abnormal (too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too stormy) Recent months have seemed "normal"; which I now perceive as weird. The last rainstorm was weird though. There were reports of 5-8 inches of rain to the south; but 0 rainfall just to the north,. so can use rain again. Soil moisture is good but my feeling is that the overall rainfall pattern is just much more unpredictable than in years past. You don't need to be a meteorologist or have fancy equipment to figure this out. I just compare how more attention needs to be placed on my tomatoes; in the past, you just plopped them in the ground and they grew without your assistance (supplemental waterings).

P.S., Heat advisories are issued based on local norms. My average July high is 86 F (they are not going to issue heat advisories every day); locally, it takes temps in the mid 90's with high humidity to issue an advisory (in Texas, it's probably different).

When a couple of us went to the UK in 1994 we were told 70 degrees F in Surrey (outside of London) would be considered punitive by many of the locals.

We are currently under an "excessive heat warning": "An Excessive Heat Warning means that a prolonged period of unusually hot weather will occur, creating a dangerous situation in which heat illnesses are possible. Drink plenty of fluids, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. This is especially true during hot weather when car interiors can reach lethal temperatures in a matter of minutes." National Weather Service

"When a couple of us went to the UK in 1994 we were told 70 degrees F in Surrey (outside of London) would be considered punitive by many of the locals."

What wusses!

Trying sleeping in a bedroom at night (in a NYC brick apartment building), with an overnight, humid LOW of 90! My childhood memories of 'summer in the city'.

Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog

Monday, July 31, 2017

Portland Faces Historic Heat, while Seattle Experiences A Major Heat Wave

Wow...a very comfortable 74 here right now, with a light breeze. The jet stream must be doing something weird.

Wow, I'm glad I didn't start this thread, but, It seems that there isn't much I can do to avoid the wrath of the gods unless I can keep the temperatatures above 80 F.

It just was impossible, the temps, are fluidly 78F and easily into the 90's F. I would just be happy to keep the temps where the folks who live there need it to be.

Western heat is different than eastern heat poaky. The body really perceives it differently. In the West, the relative humidity tends to be quite LOW this time of year; which means that your body system of perspiration actually WORKS. In fact, it's easier to get dehydrated because the sweat evaporates so fast you're not even aware of how much water you're really losing. I think the sun feels worse too; maybe because of the drier/clearer atmosphere. (In the East, so many days are party cloudy, hazy, overcast, etc...) BUT, they really tend to cool off at night; big differences between day and night, so if you don't have AC, the body gets a chance to recuperate. Compare that to the East. I can go outside under CLOUDY skies and start dripping as soon as I walk out. I am very conscious of the sweat because it does not evaporate because the air is already saturated, so it's not long (if I am working in the garden), that I am standing/sitting in a pool of my own sweat (without any sun in sight). The other difference is that eastern nights stay warm and steamy at night during heat waves (body can't cool off).

Those differences I mentioned above, also apply to our trees and shrubs. Different climates offer different challenges, advantages and disadvantages. Something to keep in mind when you consider those gardening zones (that only take into consideration average, minimum cold).

i wasnt feeling much pity for you all ... having to suffer thru what i might call a usual MI summer ..

but then i heard/read .. many of the peeps dont have a/c .... well.. carp.. that sux ... lol ,...

are night temps holding high.. or do they fall back down .. i hate sleeping hot and sweaty ... when the only reason is.. that i am breathing ... lol ... thats some prime real estate for some hardcore nightmares ....

ken

Temperatures cool down nicely so seldom a need for A/C at night. And although the humidity creeps up at night, it is nothing like folks in the midwest and further east experience.

And it DOES make a difference with what you are used to :-) If you typically experience summer temps that hover around 75-80F, jumping up into the 90's (and high 90's at that!!) for more than a couple of days is a bit of culture shock.

My A/C has been on at night for 2 months straight! Its not even the temps its the humidity at night...88% right now.

Several trees from the Rosaceae genus have almost defoliated.

Drought monitor isn't picking up anything highly unusual out west this year.
Hopefully you get some rain out there soon! Don't want a repeat of what you had the last couple years.

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

Here is that nasty year Tornado mentioned. I felt like my face was melting when it was 105 degrees with ultra high humidity.

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/mapsanddata/maparchive.aspx

Remember the Neal Diamond song, Hot August Night? Well, we're having quite the opposite. The high today was 58F; windy and rainy to boot. It has been warm and sticky tha past couple weeks, so today was a delightful, nasty day.

We don't even have A/C. It cools down so much at night that the house almost always cools off. However, these 10-day heat waves are doing a number on the plants. Our ambient humidity is in the teens and many things just look blow-torched! No matter how much I water they can't hydrate fast enough. Many conifers do just fine, though, as do the Australians and the cacti/succulents.

My family has been out west on several occasions; how different the heat is was something we always remarked upon. At a ranch on the high plains of Montana, the thermometer on the shady side of a deck, early afternoon, was showing 90F, however it was windy and if you stood there you actually felt chilly! At 90F! Which if you think about it should be possible if the humidity is insanely low like 10% RH...it still is below your body temp. And of course we were wearing the 1980s style short pants and short-short sleeve polo shirts...probably wouldn't have felt chilly in jeans. Also we were also warned that night that we would have to put blankets on the bed. Sure enough we woke up the next morning freezing our butts off, it must have been around the upper 40s by morning. Without running any heat at night, the little clapboard wooden ranch (on a real ranch LOL) house cooled off quickly. This was right next to the Rockies, but to the east, so there was probably Chinook heating during the day.

A few years later we were in Port Angeles WA for one of your heatwaves...maybe around 1990 or 1991? It had started when we were in Astoria, OR. Anyhow I can't remember the exact figure now but it was above 90F and locals acted like it was a sign of the end times. We specifically remarked it was NOT as dry feeling as Montana had been 3 or 4 years earlier. But our motel gave us a window fan to air the room out and it did seem to cool down a little bit at night...enough to sleep anyhow. Not the stifling humidity of the east at all. By the time we went on to Victoria, BC, it had cooled down.

update: based on the chart from this academic paper: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-094.1  it was indeed 1990. And that would make sense because our family friends in San Francisco were still able to show us fresh damage from the 1989 earthquake, which was probably removed/rebuilt by summer 1991.

Unusually cool air is moving south into the upper great plains. Since the "volume" of air to its south is constant, there will be some pushback northward on the adjacent sides of the outbreak. That's why the Pacific northwest is warm. In fact there was so much northward push there that this morning some of the southwest monsoon moisture was pushed northwest to near San Francisco!

Last couple of days did not reach the highs anticipated - hot, but not record breaking! Temperatures were slightly moderated by the volume of smoke drifting down from wildfires in BC, the Okanogan and Montana. Very hazy!! So in addition to extreme heat warnings, we have severe air quality issues. And still dry as a bone :-)

Wow, it's sad when you have to be like "thank goodness there are massive forest fires going on somewhere, to cool things off". As beng alluded to, there's actually some flooding in SW California now, which shows how out of kilter things are. It's like weather patterns are shifted 800 miles to the NW. They are getting conditions more like you'd see in north-central MX, PNW getting Nevada weather, etc.

We usually have 100's by now in SW Missouri, just been dry, but not too much different other than slightly cooler

Sorry for my drunken observations above guys. I have never been out west, but, I know humidity quite well. I have friends who've been out west though, I had thought that the PNW was more of a humid area though because of all the rain, (usually) but, I guess being in the west in say Seattle, the air isn't humid? WE've had alot of rain but high temps this summer here in SW Pa. Many 90'sF here, but, Pittsburgh has remained under the 90'sF except for a few days, I'm about 40, 50 miles from the city of Pittsburgh where my news weather forecast comes from, they are north of me. Great weather for my Live oak :) . We usually don't get temps in the 90'sF very often. This year we've gotten at least 10 days or more. I'm glad for the rain, I only hope for next year to be as rainy, but, you never know what your gonna get. I have a handful of seedling trees, so the rain is needed, or I'll be running hoses way down in my yard.

I assume your joking about forest fires cooling things off davidrt? If not, explain. That's a good reason to NOT want to live there. I know someone who wants to live in Arizona, even without humidity, I think the temps would be unbearable. I think most folks don't even go outside very long until after sundown. For me the heat and rattlesnakes are too much for me. I know someone who stayed in a RV park for a while in Arizona and they employed a full time rattlesnake or snake wrangler. Texas is full of em too. They had to look under their Rv's every time they went to come out or go in, well, when coming out you can only look so far. Later.