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It's the 2nd wettest year so far. Will we finally dry out?

We've only been 90 or higher 4 times, well below average.
Credit: KARE

CHANHASSEN, Minn. — After this weekend’s rainfall, 2019 is now the 2nd wettest year on record through the middle of August. So I headed down to the National Weather Service in Chanhassen to find out what’s the deal!? and if we can expect the wet streak to continue.

Birds chirping. Lawnmowers running. Splashing in the pool. These are the sounds of summer! Or that’s how it’s supposed to be. It seems this go around, another sound of summer has become way too common. The sound of rain and storms.

Talking to Mike Griesinger with the National Weather Service, he explained this past July we've had a lot more days with rain, which is a bit different than an average July:

“A lot of times... we’ll get 5 or 6 inches of rain in the month of July, but you get that because you got 2 inches of rain on three different days and a lot of dry days in between. Last July, there’s a lot of quarter-, half-inch days of rain spread through the whole month.”

And believe it or not, the amount of rainy days, and not necessarily the amount of rain, can affect how hot our temperatures get. It all comes down to soil moisture. The more rainy days we have, the more likely the soil remains saturated.

“When the sun heats the ground, a lot of that energy, what it goes to first, before it heats the air, is (to) evaporate water. So if you have wet soils and wet conditions, you’re losing some of that sun’s energy to get rid of that moisture before you start heating up.”

That might help explain why we’ve only hit 90 degrees four times this year so far. With the end of summer approaching, it doesn’t look like we’ll reach the average of 13 days at 90 or above, and we will definitely fall well short of the 20 days we saw just last year.

For the next month or two, it's looking to be more of the same. There's no signs at the moment we're going to see any significant heat wave and there's a chance we may have to wait until 2020 to see another 90+ degree day. But I'm not ready to make that call just yet. Mother Nature has a way of throwing curve-balls when we least expect it.

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