Is it just one extreme or the other or is there some middle ground that is kind of normal.

Not from the political end this time , but I don't believe the news.  City folk don't look at weather the way farm people do. So I am interested if anybody is at all near normal in the middle of the country.

I did have an inch of rain a month ago.  I had been praying to God for an inch of rain and he delivered.  However, I needed to be more specific in my prayers.  I should have specified an inch horizontal not vertical.  I always knew he had a sense of humor.  

Spring, such as it was, was very cold, stayed that way until a couple weeks into May.  Not overly wet, but wet enough, late snows.  Fieldwork like oats, tillage, etc. was delayed a month.  Then it was instantly near 90 degrees.  We did get some decent enough rains through June to keep things looking OK, but it got so hot so quick and the rains weren't that big, that when the really hot dry crap of July started it got bad in a hurry.

Normally here it is high humidity, and quite heavy dew in the mornings.  From about July 12 - 23, it got HOT, like 97-98 most days, low humidity, no dew, and friggin' WINDY.  They have a word for something that blows hot dry air: a dryer!!  With our already behind needed rains, that really took a toll.  Pastures are dead, first cutting hay died off to maturity before you could get it harvested and second cutting is blossoming at about 6 inches tall.  I had some corn die in lighter soils.  I can only remember one other time of corn dying, don't remember the year, but seems ~ 8 years ago thereabouts.  

We got a nice rain Sunday the 24th, but too late for a lot of things.  Soybeans are tough little beggars and still holding on, so hopefully that rain will carry them through.  The heat is coming back next week, and very little rain in the forecast.  Definitely don't have a clue what the crop is going to look like come harvest time.  

something like this.......

Had been cutting across S IA but has since dropped S.  Quite a few Dry Cool fronts dropping from Canuckistan.

Sorry T in someway I must be missing dumb out of place comments. Nothing against you getting in too. I always like the going off in different direction. That is some of the best of this place get off the  pavement so to speak.

You all confirmed what I was thinking. Mostly a dry year. One little spot gets dumped on, no good political fodder leaning the way the MSM does. The headline was something like DAMAGE SO BAD WEEKS TO KNOW HOW MANY DIED.  

I have no idea how much thought and planning went into a local event that plays perfectly in the global warming/climate change theme. The weather for Paso Robles Ca was always recorded at the city water works on the river bank. But was changed 20 to  30 years ago to city airport. A relic of WW2 is the Paso Robles airport. Given to the county, given to the city.  Wonderful place for a airport on a wide open plain, no mountains close at all. When the airport became city thing FAA and National Weather Service all combined and put automatic weather reporting equipment in. 

But anybody with a functioning brain and the least bit of weather science knows up lifted air going over hill drops more rain on the up slope of hill and gets less after it passes. To get a rain that amount to anything we need surface air moving up from the south ( where that tip that sticks out on the center of Caly coast line) but the upper air coming on land from out over the Pacific (heading for that Nebraski machine).  So from the 150 years or so of weather records the father east away from the coast YOU GET LESS RAIN. So the local reporting has been moved east a about 2 miles  so guess what. the average rainfall in Paso Robles is going down in the last 30 years.

There is also some alinement of mountains and valleys that draws much cooler coastal in a narrow area that named the Templeton Gap (Templeton is the next town south of PR and the center of the air flow and generally the coolest town in summer).  Paso Robles is on the north edge of this air flow, and the airport is northeast of town. So it has always been a bit hotter there as well. So again the climate changers win  with real numbers  but then again are they correct real numbers. But the local TV guesser make good hay out of all the new hottest or driest on record. He can always seem to spin a new something up.

So stay cool/hot , wet/dry, what ever you want out there. I know we cannot all like the same thing  the reason somebody makes "pretty" for some of you when you already had to much.

The 'heat island' is real. West of me 2 major highways join (403 + 401) like a '----<' .

That splits 99.44% of all thunderstorms to got north east and south east, missing us in the 'middle'.

re: The real problem and is fast coming to self determined response is too many people to feed, house, clothe and control. It will self correct, may not/will not like or enjoy it but is coming.

It's already here,just too many have their eyes closed, heads in the sand, won't admit it.

There are a couple things going on. First is news media hype. News media is the propaganda arm of demonrat party.....so are hauling the water for the climate change agenda. If you hope to make drastic changes of the type they are trying to enact, you have to have some measure of public support. Pushing the agenda is part of that. And of course you have to follow the money. That could take a book unto itself.

Some years back, I sat through a presentation on weather cycles by an Iowa State expert. He showed us a pattern of long and short term weather cycles, going back hundreds of years. There are at least 3 of these "short term" cycles....like 75, 35 and 15. The appear in regular waves, almost like a sine wave. When in a warming cycle, you get large swings in temps, droughts, floods, etc. When in a cooling cycle, things even out and become stable. So come out of a stable period, into a warming period and it seems like things are changing.....and for the worse. As per him....it's normal. And likely as not, related to things way out of our control.......like increases and declines in solar activity......distances to sun.....as orbits are not round but elliptical.

So St. Louis flood? Without looking it up, who remembers the KC flood? When and where? It was a really big deal. Wipe out a famous section of town. Not that long ago.

I can remember some years like this one....when early on, it seemed like it rained almost every day. Not little sprinkles, but violet storms.......2 to 3 inches a night. A neighbor came by to bring us a pump to pump out our root cellar.........told us he had seen weather like that before.......would quit around June 10th. He was right. Other years when we had to feed green chopped corn in Aug, as pastures looked as bare as a parking lot.

So a few weeks back, local TV was reporting on hot weather. 102 actual.......but that was not the record. Record was 110.......set in 1910. Global warming cause that? Or the dust bowl years of the 30's?

Going back further than that, some of the warmest weather ever coincided with rise of Roman Empire.....and it's demise with a cold weather. On balance, warm is better than cold.

Here where I worked last is a defined Heat Island for scientific examinations and records, the cooling tower at the Nuke.  Have watched radar approaches of storms where while we ran the plant storms would split or be redirected by the tower Plume, considerably warmer and more humid as many of the storm fronts.

Our Sun runs on 11 year extreme cycles from Severe to near Silent of activity, it also runs on 90 year(+/-) cycles with one that should conclude in 2030 to 2040.  Those can be really extreme with such as the Maunder Minimum or the Younger Dryas Minimum.

The KC flood I mentioned was in 1977. They got about 12 inches of rain in one night and it sent a wall of water down Brush Creek on the south side of Country Club Plaza, and wiped out about half the Plaza in the process. A freak storm that to my knowledge hasn't happened since.

But then last year, about 80 miles east of there, small area of upland got hit with a 12 inch rain that sent so much water into the nearby creek it jumped the levee......then flowed east inside the levee, then over a cross levee, until it got to our farm, where it came to a halt.......stacking up 6 feet deep over 200 acres. And no.......flood insurance didn't come close to covering any of that.

Then there was the freak storm of 2011, in which a huge swath of Montana got 11 inches of rain one night........sending a wall of water down the MO River system. Corps got caught with their pants down and reservoirs full, so had no choice but to dump it. River ran bluff to bluff from Yankton to about KC......wiping out everything in it's path.....including RR tracks that ran from WY coal fields to east coast power plants. Panic City!!! Downstream of KC, ran flood stage for over a month, and almost all levees eventually failed  from KC to Jefferson City.

Can remember a couple other storms.......4 inches on night.......7 the next.......North Central MO in Salt River basin.......sent a wall of water to Mark Twain Reservoir........which at one point was dumping 2X to 3X the amount of water from emergency spillways as any previous record discharge.......and that has been in place nearly 40 years.

Point to all this is these freak storms are a lot more common than we remember and are nothing new. What is new is agenda driven media hype.

And one more story..........during 93' flood, CBS sent a news crew to Hartsburg MO to do a bit on the flood. Found a bunch of farmers what had gathered at a local tavern.......got there in boats.......tied up to front porch side by side........like horses of old. Was told they would like to film those guys, but if they did, was wanting them to cry on camera if they could. Farmers told them to take a hike........it was just a flood. Same as every other flood. CBS then packed up and moved on..........but did find some folks down around Defiance......sure enough.......crocodile tears!

Anyone dumb enough to consider Men will Control Weather or Rivers, Droughts or Floods needs medical help as delusional.

Natives of US SW, Anasazi of largest note had Huge Civilizations, dependent of crops, rains, ability to traverse large tracts of ground reasonably quickly with goods from other regions, all was for naught as weather on those people changed as well.

Nothing we are seeing is any different than those instances of the past, people just forgot they DID happen in the past and with far fewer people to witness or record.

https://www.climate-policy-watcher.org/plate-tectonics/history-of-levee-building-on-the-mississippi-river.html" rel="nofollow - History of Levee Building on the Mississippi River - Plate Tectonics (climate-policy-watcher.org)

Just depends on who decides what in history is important for the day.  New Orleans is still Subsiding(Sinking) as are many parts of Florida and along the Gulf Coast, NOT Oceans Rising, Lands SINKING.

Alot of churches in the area worked together and ran a kitchen in the basement of one of the churches for all volunteers, during the day. We ate well! at least for lunch. We dined with, among others, prisoners from some prison(s?) that were permitted to volunteer, but they came with armed guards placed statically inside and out. There were VFD units, BoyScout troops, Church groups, etc all working in the area, from all over the USA. I spoke to one VFD from Minnesota, if I remember right, who told me they had set up a camp, and was revolving volunteer firemen in and out weekly, planning on 2-3 month on site.

interesting experience

100's of years.....Gee, why aren't any of the usual suspect ripping apart this statement?  Did Hiawatha and Sitting Bull and Geronimo's great great great great grandfathers keep weather records?

Or:

As a rule, man is a fool

When it's hot he wants it cool

When it cool he wants it hot

Always wanting what is not

I've also wondered about the accuracy of historic records.......from say 1800's forward. How accurate were the instruments? I have 3 different thermometers in the barn shop and none of them read the same. Those replaced a goofy one that wasn't even close. I threw it away. d

BTW, during that 1977 flood in KC, the weather warning then was global cooling. Permafrost was moving south at an alarming rate and world was going to starve to death. Can't grow corn or wheat on frozen soil. Nothing grows on frozen soil.