If you remember the repeated storms that kept slamming California last winter, the weather pattern now is sort of like the opposite of that. AccuWeather's Bob Larson explains.
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00:00 Well, if it isn't pouring rain, it's been incredibly humid.
00:03 We've seen the images from this summer in the Northeast and throughout New England especially,
00:08 washed out, flooded or destroyed roads, along with swollen and raging rivers.
00:13 AccuWeather regional expert Bob Larson joins us to put some perspective on this ridiculous
00:18 rainfall.
00:19 Bob, thanks for your time.
00:20 Thanks for joining us.
00:21 Sure.
00:22 It's good to be here, Kevin.
00:23 And what we've seen...
00:24 I'm sorry.
00:25 Go right ahead.
00:26 I'm sorry.
00:27 Hey, hey, you know.
00:28 I think that the upper level wind pattern, if you look at what weather is happening anywhere
00:33 in the world, you can almost always trace it to what?
00:36 The jet stream, right?
00:37 And here in the U.S., in the summertime, what we're seeing is a jet stream that's not too
00:42 different from a normal summer.
00:44 But tell us how that jet stream's location has been impacting some of the storms we've
00:49 seen in the Northeast this summer.
00:51 Well, here we see a typical jet stream pattern during the summer.
00:54 To get into the warmer summer months, the jet stream lifts north during the warm weather
00:58 season, and that tends to be the steering track for storm systems that move across the
01:03 northern tier states.
01:04 Cold fronts extend southward out of those storms.
01:07 You typically get occasional showers and thunderstorms as the fronts move through.
01:11 It's been a little bit different this year in the sense that we've seen a large bridge
01:16 of high pressure in the west, the so-called heat dome, leading to the extreme and record-breaking
01:21 heat out west, while at the same time there's been more of a dip in the jet stream farther
01:25 to the east, much more so than what we would typically see.
01:28 And that's often the way it works with a jet stream.
01:30 When one part of the country, we see the jet goes up, another part of the country it goes
01:33 down, much like a seesaw, and vice versa.
01:35 We saw this last winter with the countless storms that kept slamming into California
01:40 with a dip in the jet stream out west, while all the while the jet stream had lifted farther
01:44 to the north than the east, and it was mild and in many cases almost snowless.
01:48 It's more or less the opposite of what we've seen and are continuing to see this summer.
01:54 That's a good point, Bob.
01:55 And you know, when it comes to a wet summer, of course we've seen those, you have too,
01:59 you've lived here for a long time here in the northeast, but what's a little bit different
02:03 about this really wet and flooded summer compared to maybe other ones?
02:08 Over the years we've all witnessed wet summers, we've witnessed dry summers, where the lawns
02:12 tend to turn brown, particularly during the latter stages of July and August.
02:16 What sets this year apart, in my mind, is the fact that in many parts of the northeast,
02:21 coming out of May and on into June as we were ramping up into the warm weather season, it
02:25 was exceptionally dry.
02:27 Things were drying out very early, much earlier than we typically see it, but rather than
02:31 that evolving into a continuous drought-like summer, it's almost as if we've flipped the
02:36 switch and we've gone from excessive dryness to excessive and relentless rainfall over
02:41 the past several weeks, and we've seen countless examples of flash flooding, serious flash
02:46 flooding a couple weekends ago from Orange County in New York, northward through Vermont
02:50 most recently with the footage we just saw there, the deadly flash flooding in Bucks
02:54 County north of Philadelphia.
02:56 It's just complete turnaround from several weeks ago.
02:59 You got it, Bob.
03:00 Going from one extreme to the other, not exactly the way that we want to live our lives weather-wise,
03:04 but we have to deal with it.
03:05 Bob Larson, AccuWeather regional expert, thank you very much for your time.