Chicago climate report: Cooler temps, drought conditions, but warming lake temps

NOTE: This article is now an almanac of Sunday’s weather and a larger look at Chicagoland’s climate. We have published a new forecast story for Monday.

Saturday offered some beautiful sunshine and temps in the pleasant mid 60s, but was cooler lakeside. This stretch of unseasonably cooler weather for Chicagoland continues into an 8th day in a row Sunday. The average high temp is mid 70s for this part of late May.

We have had some warmth this month but it was quite fleeting. We hit our first 90 degrees on the 15th. On our scorecard of temps of 80 or warmer, we’ve racked up only a handful so far at O’Hare and a few more at Midway.

Rainfall has also been an issue this month. May is typically our wettest month of the year with about four and a half inches of rain, but we’re way behind on that amount. Since January 1st we’re down by 4″ of precipitation. Some of that has to do with our lack of snowfall this past winter. We’ve also just seen a dry May, with only an inch of precipitation when we usually get more than four inches of rain.

The dry weather really showed up in a visual way we rarely see around here this month too. It was a week ago Friday that strong southerly winds picked up a lot of dirt from non-yet planted fields in Central Illinois and hurled it towards Chicagoland in 60 mph gusts as a dark wall of dust. Dust storms are something we see more often downstate or out in more arid parts of the western U.S. The last time we had a big dust storm in Chicago was more than 30 years ago and our biggest ever was part of the “Dust Bowl” atmospheric phenomena in the 1930s almost a century ago. But the Friday event was the first ever Dust Storm Warning ever issued for the City of Chicago.

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Not surprisingly, all of Chicagoland is under some form of drought at the moment. The USDA’s Drought Monitor released every Thursday places most of us in the area are considered “abnormally dry” to “moderate drought” but there are far worse drought conditions on the Great Plains as we get deeper into planting season.

Water temps are on the rise. Last weekend we had our first water temp along the Chicago shore at 60 degrees so far this year. Since then, we’ve backed those temps off to the mid 50s. The water still is dangerously cold. Water colder than 70 degrees can zap swimmers’ energy very rapidly.

Our extended temperature outlook into the first part of June is at or below average. But that doesn’t necessarily mean cold since the average high is now in the mid 70s. This is all part of a really wavy jet stream pattern that seems to have a root cause, in part, in the north pole vortex being knocked again out of the arctic circle and sloshing colder temps into lower latitudes where we all live. This colder weather pattern looks to fully break during the first week of June for us around the Great Lakes. But cooler than average temp continues for folks down in Dixie.

What will help with getting our temps back to average is not only the pattern shift but also the longer days ahead. We’ve already had sunsets past 8 p.m., and our longest days of the year happen in the northern hemisphere around Summer Solstice on the 20th. Average high temps in June climb into the 80s for highs and 60s for lows.