Iowa getting blasted; some storms spread into Minnesota

The Twin Cities have picked up 11.36 inches of rain at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport this month as of this afternoon.

That is just 0.31 inch short of the June monthly record, but the light showers flitting around the area probably will be insufficient to put us over the top, which is a very good thing for the flooding situation. A strong second place finish will be more than adequate.

Much of northern Minnesota has been quite breezy today thanks to a tight pressure gradient. Wind gusts have exceeded 45 mph from the southwest in Duluth, both at the airport high on the hill and down at the harbor.

The big story today is the mass of severe thunderstorms and heavy rain pummeling Iowa.

Craig Edwards wrote about this developing weather story in his noon blog, and the nasty weather has been occurring this afternoon mainly in a broad west-to-east band across central Iowa.

Tornado, severe thunderstorm and flash flood warnings have been issued for many areas. Heavy rain has fallen including some amounts in excess of three inches such as in Iowa City, and many roads are closed.

This rough weather will continue to track eastward across southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, toward Milwaukee and Chicago, this evening.

While we have had a wide scattering of mostly light showers across Minnesota, the soggy southeast corner has been hit with heavy rain that pushed northeast out of Iowa earlier today.

The areas in Minnesota hit the hardest this afternoon have been mainly from Albert Lea to Lanesboro, Caledonia and Winona, and then down the Mississippi River toward La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The water vapor satellite photos are quite useful to meteorologists as they indicate the amount of moisture in the atmosphere and, when viewed as a loop, show where that moisture is headed.

A water vapor image from early this afternoon shows the huge storms over Iowa and where some of the storms and cloud tops (moisture) have spread across southern Minnesota.

Also note the vast, unseasonable strong storm with less moisture (lower-topped clouds) swirling over Canada that has been kicking off showers in northwestern Minnesota today.

That Canadian low also will be sweeping much cooler temperatures across our state for tomorrow. Expect highs on Tuesday to be about fifteen degrees cooler than normal for July 1 as they range from around 60 in the northwest to the low 70s in the southeast.

There will be lots of clouds and scattered showers, and maybe a few afternoon thunderstorms from around the metro area to southeastern Minnesota.

Wednesday and Thursday should be mostly sunny with a re-warming trend beginning that will carry through the holiday weekend.

The July precipitation outlook from the Climate Prediction Center indicates that our Minnesota rainfall is likely to be fairly close to normal. Rainfall can be spotty, however, so these monthly precipitation forecasts are just an early look at what has a fairly good chance of occurring.

Monthly temperature outlooks tend to be more reliable than precipitation outlooks because they are mainly a function of the air mass and, therefore, not so locally variable.

Long range climatological models are predicting a relatively cool July for Minnesota, especially across the northern half of the state.