How Has Our Summer Outlook Fared So Far?

Those of you who are saying "What happened to the cool summer you guys talked about"? My response is three fold. One, remember that no summer is ever cool. We predicate our summer outlook with this statement each year. Two, we talked about how this summer would have frequent breaks from the heat. That is, we'd have bursts of heat followed by breaks in the 70s especially early on. That was the critical element of our outlook WHICH HAS WORKED OUT TREMENDOUSLY! Third, we are only 30 days into the 3 months are summer. So far, June temperatures are running about 0.8 degrees above average. Here is our summer outlook map (for all 3 months) that we used looking at several years that were shaping up to be similar to 2014. Remember that this map was created on April 9th.

Here is a better comparison between our forecast and the June temperatures.

1) The core of the heat we believed would push a bit east into the Great Plains. It stayed out west.
2) The areas of "cooler" air (gulf coast and Florida) were on target.
3) The slightly above normal temperatures for Ohio and the Ohio Valley were pretty close.

     The BIG miss was the "cooler" air in the upper Great Plains.

Have the overall conditions changed since April? Will we stick with the original summer outlook? I'll revisit summer in a few week.