Summer 2015 in retrospect

A very active, stormy summer has officially drawn to a close. With little to no thunderstorm potential for Michigan on the long range model horizon, it's safe to say that our fall weather patterns are now in place, and the dreaded S-word will become the primary focus of this blog for the next few months. To that end, I'm retiring the thunderstorm outlook for the season; it will be restored in the event of a rare fall severe weather outbreak.

I'd like to briefly recap what the state saw this year in terms of weather for archive purposes.

The summer of 2015 was quite the wet one here Michigan.  The thumb area, in particular, has been saturated for several months, and is only now beginning to dry out.  We had a somewhat dry early spring, punctuated by little snowmelt and very few episodes of stratiform precipitation, however, once thunderstorm season kicked off, the tables turned significantly.  The state's capital wound up seeing it's third wettest June and third wettest month since records began being recorded in 1863. Just about every place records were taken in the state had above normal June precipitation totals, with most significantly above normal. July was also wet, though to a lesser degree, though August revved back up quite a bit as well. With that in mind, you might be surprised to find out that Michigan was actually on the moderate end of what it received for rainfall this year so far in comparison to other areas of the country. Pretty much the entire eastern two thirds of the country saw above-normal precipitation, with other areas of the Midwest receiving the most.

Michigan was actually spared the worst of the rain this summer when compared to other states.

Regarding severe weather, there were five major events that affected southeast Michigan this year. The first two events were on May 26th and May 27th, affecting mostly central lower MI on the first day and then extreme SE Michigan on the second day.  Neither were particularly widespread.  June 14th saw very heavy rain which caused flood damage, but little in the way of wind or storm damage.

A widespread severe weather event occurred in the afternoon and evening hours of June 22nd, 2015. For several days prior to this event, model data was indicative of a potentially major severe weather outbreak throughout the portions of central and southeast lower Michigan. The outbreak manifested itself in the form of a damaging MCS which moved through during the mid to late afternoon hours, and a series of tornadic supercells which formed during the early evening hours. One of these storms spawned an EF-2 tornado in the southeastern portion of Saginaw county, where it did considerable damage to a camp site and injured 2. It then moved into the Millington area of Tuscola county where it did considerable property damage. Estimated winds of this tornado were 115mph. Three other tornadoes touched down during this event, two of which were rated EF-1 and the third EF-0.

Line of storms (with warnings) from around 11:30PM EDT June 22nd 2015.

An even more widespread and intense event occurred throughout the day on Sunday, August 2nd. Four lines of very intense severe thunderstorms plowed across the state in a northwest-to-southeast movement, with just about every area of the lower peninsula affected, and a section extending from the Traverse City area into the Thumb particularly so.

Counties highlighted in red were most affected by the August 2nd 2015 severe weather outbreak. 

A very strong cold front plowing into 90° temperatures with dewpoints in the 70s triggered this event, which produced storms with wind gusts to 80mph and up to softball sized hail.  One tornado was confirmed in Owendale, which is a small town in Huron County. This tornado was rated EF-1 and did significant damage to the local school, and completely destroyed one business.

Photos of clouds, hail and damage photos/reports from the August 2nd 2015 event.

A total of four tornado watches and eight severe thunderstorm watches were issued for areas of the state.

All in all, I'd say this is one of the more active summers in recent memory, at least for my neck of the woods. The thumb got drenched. Since no records are kept, it's tough to say just how much rain we got in comparison to other areas of the state. With that in mind, there were enough flooded fields and higher than usual streams to say we got just as much if not more than everywhere else. The August 2nd storms hit us especially hard, with essentially the entire lakeshore area of Huron County losing power, and major wind damage throughout.

Now that our severe weather season has wound to a close, I will probably be making fewer posts. In the event of a major winter storm that looks to affect the region, I will begin making more posts, but I'd fully expect not more than one or two posts a week during this duration, mostly covering historical events, climate data, temperature trends and updates from Andrew. I'll make a post sometime within the next few days about what my expectations are for this winter based on previous year analogues as well as rumblings from the scientific community.