July weather preview: Early predictions, record events and more

Here we are, right on the doorstep of tank top, shorts and sunscreen time, because we all know what July means — beach weather, and that’s all about heat, heat, heat.

But there are two other H’s that also demand attention: humidity and haze.

For that, we can thank “the prevailing air mass coming from the south,” said Bill Korbel, News 12 Long Island meteorologist, meaning dew points around 70 degrees. Such air is already so brimming with moisture that our personal, automatic cool-down mechanism — the evaporation of sweat — slows way down, hence, that sticky, stifling feeling.  

Summer’s “weak and slow moving weather systems,” sometimes parking over us for days, lead to haze and poor air quality, Korbel said.

With much relief to be found at area beaches, there can also be hazards, rip currents and severe thunderstorms among them. “You do not want to be on a beach or in the water when thunder booms,” Korbel said.

And while July does win hottest-month honors on Long Island — edging out August by 1 degree — sometimes we are blessed by “dry and cooler air coming our way from Canada,” Korbel said.

How about this year?

Look for some warm, humid conditions, with chances of thunderstorms, precisely what you would expect for July, Korbel said. The Climate Prediction Center is indicating above-normal temperatures, on average, for the first two weeks, with no call on precipitation.

WHAT’S NORMAL, WHAT’S NOT

TEMPS

While some months see a big jump in daily temperatures from the first day to the last, July not so much. We start out with a daily high of 81 and low of 65 at Long Island MacArthur Airport. And by month’s end, that’s an 82-degree high, with 67 the low.

But temperatures have risen as high as 104 degrees in 1966, and dropped as low as 49 in 1965.  

PRECIP

On average, the month sees 3.43 inches of precipitation.

But, it’s recorded as much as 8.36 inches in 1984.

And as little as 0.59 inches in 1966.

SNOW

Normal is no snow at all.

WILD WEATHER

We scoured our archives — and memories! — and here are some of the most notable weather events and how Newsday covered them at the time.  

Lightning from a severe afternoon thunderstorm struck at Jones Beach and killed two beachgoers — an aspiring young actor who had moved to Manhattan from Massachusetts and a 36-year-old professor living in Briarwood, Queens, who succumbed the following day.

The first was hit as he was walking near the water. The other, carrying a radio and umbrella, was on the way to his car.

“Two others narrowly escaped serious injury,” Newsday reported.

“I was holding the umbrella by the metal part and then the lightning came,” said a 16-year-old high school student from the Bronx.

“It was like a white flash of light. It felt like it was a magnet because I couldn’t pull my hand apart from it,” the teen said, at that point waiting with her family on the boardwalk while her dad went to get the car. “I was crying and screaming ‘I got hit by lightning. I got hit by lightning.’ Then I couldn’t move my hand. It was all numb.”

That would have been late afternoon as a severe thunderstorm was hurling several lightning bolts onto the beach, Newsday reported. For the seventh straight day in the metropolitan area “a lid of steamy weather hovered above the 90-degree mark,” punctuated in some areas by “violent storms and gusting winds.”

“The storm came in suddenly,” Newsday said, “and as lifeguards got people out of the water and were moving them off the beach, four separate bolts struck over a three-mile stretch of beach.”

A meteorologist at the time said that most lightning-related deaths “do occur outdoors at beaches, fields, golf courses, on the water, any flat open area.”

While there actually have been healthy stretches with no 90 degree or above days — the longest 24 months on the dot — Long Island got the flip side 20 years ago.

That July saw 12 days of 90 or up at MacArthur Airport, “the most for any month on record,” said Samantha Borisoff, climatologist with the Northeast Regional Climate Center, leading to its being crowned “all-time hottest month on record.”

“A persistent area of high pressure” appeared to be “dominating the weather pattern,” leading to this steamy stretch, Borisoff said.

Reporters, editors and their thesauruses got a workout for varying ways to describe the heat — unrelenting, scorching, sizzling, oppressive, dangerous, intense, blazing, merciless, steaming, blistering, oven-like, record burner, meltdown month.

By July’s close, Newsday put it this way: “The sky was a stark and merciless blue, and the sun’s radiance wrapped around the skin like hot wax.”

Roads buckled, cars conked out and Long Island Rail Road switches were “flummoxed.”

With a “hurricane of air conditioners on full blast,” electric use set a record, this just six days into the month, as more than 600 transformers blew, taking the lights and those humming conditioners with them.

“It was just dreadful, the most uncomfortable night of my life,” said a science teacher in East Hampton — with no phone service, electricity or the ability to pump water out of the well.

Three deaths were reported by month’s end.

Talk about a skydiving airplane — this one lifted off the ground and dove right into a nearby tree, not of its own volition, but courtesy of a short-lived F2 tornado. (That’s third on an intensity scale of 6, meaning it was strong.)

Touching down for just 40 seconds or so, the twister also had time to toss a 60-foot trailer into the air — with a man in it.

'The sunset was gorgeous, a crescent moon rose, and the music played on. A summer day doesn't get better than that.'

Trish Minogue Collins, of Mastic, recalls the perfect weather during last July's Great South Bay Music Festival, in Patchogue

Serving as a skydiving school office at a small, privately owned East Moriches airport, “the trailer just disintegrated. I never saw anything like it in my life,” said a man whose family owned the airport. The trailer spun several times in midair, then smashed to the ground, he told Newsday. As for the employee in it, he was treated for minor cuts and bruises, and then released.  

The twister was a special feature of one of the severe thunderstorms that swept across the Island that evening, also damaging homes and taking out trees and power lines.

Tracking this storm on radar, the airport’s owner said he looked out the window and saw the bottom of the gray funnel just before touch down. “It happened so quick. As quick as it came, that’s as quick as it left,” he said.

The next day a National Weather Service meteorologist dispatched to survey the damage made the call — “It definitely was a tornado — an extremely small one. The entire damage area was less than a football field.” It was only the 11th twister reported in Nassau or Suffolk County since 1950, he told Newsday back then.

Around the same time, an East Moriches man in the area reported hail — coming down like “huge ice cubes.” In addition, he said, “there were hundreds of fingers of lightning. It seemed like fireworks. They were all concentrated in one spot.”  

HERE’S WHAT NEWSDAY READERS REMEMBER:

Trish Minogue Collins, of Mastic, recalled last July’s Great South Bay Music Festival, which takes place in Patchogue.

“I attended the festival on Sunday last year, and the weather was exactly what you would want for a summer day chillaxing in a beach chair listening to one great band after another. Everyone had on their favorite summer clothes, whether it was head to toe tie-dye, or designer sundress and chic straw hat. We strolled from stage to stage, from beer truck to craft vendor as a perfectly comfortable breeze blew off the bay. The sunset was gorgeous, a crescent moon rose, and the music played on. A summer day doesn’t get better than that.”   

NOTABLE DAYS AND HOW THEY’VE FARED

Fourth of July

Normal high is 81 degrees, but the day did warm up to 97 degrees in 1966 and 2010 and fell to a record low of 52 degrees in 1979. The most precipitation was 1.56 inches in 1978.

Records and normals are based on data for Long Island MacArthur Airport going back to September 1963.

Sources/research: Northeast Regional Climate Center; National Weather Service, Upton; Newsday librarians