Fourth 100+ day in row, dry conditions continue

Not much to add this evening other than we hit 101 at RDU today making Tuesday, June 10 the fourth day in a row of 100+ degree heat and another record was shattered. Since we probably wont be breaking records for the rest of the week I am going to post all the records that were broken below. One thing that stands out is that records are being broken from 1947 and 1999. Must have been some early season heat waves then too.

FRI June 6: 99 Breaks old record of 98 set in 2002
SAT June 7: 100 Breaks old record of 97 set in 1947 * Earliest to hit 100 at RDU since 1944
SUN June 8: 101 Breaks old record of 100 set in 1999
MON June 9: 100 Breaks old record of 98 set in 1999
TUES June 10: 101 Breaks old record of 97 set in 1947.

As I said above, this should be the last day of record breaking heat for the rest of the week. It will still be hot though, but it will not be as oppressive. I did mention some chances for thunderstorms this week but it is now looking less likely that this will occur. Our best chance stands to be tomorrow and most of the activity should stay south of the Triangle. This is not a good situation. I heard lots of complaints from people back in May when it was pouring rain every other day. Well now we have not seen more than .3 inches officially since May 20. If we do not get rain soon with this heat we just had, all the rain we saw in May wont even matter as drought conditions will return. Hopefully we can get some rain this week or over the weekend although right now my confidence is low. Regarding temperatures, 90 tomorrow looks good and 88-92 through Saturday. Hot yes, but not extreme like we just dealt with.

I will close out this post with something very interesting that I saw today on visible satellite imagery. I am sure you all have heard about the fire along the coast. Well the smoke can be seen stretching into the Atlantic and then up towards NJ. The image below is from 5pm today and the stream of thin looking clouds off the coast that curls up the eastern seaboard is smoke from the fire. Also of interest is the thunderstorm activity that developed off the Appalachian mountains. Speaking of storms, there was some storms that developed near where those fires are in east NC. Wonder if they came from pyrocumulonimbus clouds? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrocumulonimbus