For the first two months of the summer, it seemed as if rain was a daily occurrence. Not only was it an active period of time, in many cases, it was record-breaking between June and July. August then came around and the pattern broke to bring a much drier period. Still, it remained cooler than normal, staying consistent with the theme of the earlier part of the 2017 summer.
The cooler than normal temperatures ended up as the main story of the month. All of the major cities finished with below normal figures (in both the high and low temperature categories). The coolest city in terms of high temperature average was Rockford, clocking in at 80.4 degrees. Dayton also failed to reach the 90-degree mark, much like it did in July.
In our July newsletter, we discussed how rare of an occurrence it was to have temperatures fail to reach 90 degrees in Dayton in the heart of summer. It is even more unlikely to happen in July and August of the same meteorological summer. Since records began (these go back to 1935), it has only happened in three other years: 1958, 2000, and 2004. In fact, in these summers, not one day rose to 90 degrees or above. You have to go all the way back to June 12th to find a day that was above 90 degrees. However, it wasn’t only Dayton feeling the cooler weather at times in August, as the rest of the Midwest fell up to 1.0 to 2.5 degrees below the normal average temperature.
While it was a cool month, it was also the driest of the meteorological summer by far. The driest areas were Ohio and Indianapolis, with rainfall totaling only 3 inches for the month. On a more region-wide scale, totals fell short by as little as a tenth or two to as much as a full 1-2”. There was one record-setting rainfall event in the Cornbelt, however: Dayton saw 1.32” of rain on the 29th. This bested the previous record of 1.06” in 2003.
