Spring as it should be.

Here in juniper canyon it got down to 23 and woke up to 1.5” of snow. Seems better for snow and thunderstorms already than in Redmond where I was. Had four great thunderstorms earlier this week which is more than I had all last year in Redmond.

You guys have inspired me, so I checked the temperature stats for Chicago for the meteorological summers leading into strong Nino events. Of course this is assuming that this upcoming Nino event will peak at a strong intensity, which looks very likely but not guaranteed yet. All temperature anomalies are relative to the 1991-2020 normals. 1957 JJA: +0.4 1965 JJA: -2.6 1972 JJA: -2.0 1982 JJA: -5.0 1987 JJA: +0.4 1991 JJA: +0.4 1997 JJA: -2.9 2015 JJA: -2.8 2023 JJA: +0.3 So, we see that 5 summers were cooler than average and 4 were technically a little warmer than average, but essentially average for all intents and purposes -- and interestingly clustered around +0.3 to +0.4. Although it's a small sample size of 9 years, there are no torch summers. Based on this and the various seasonal models, my guess would be for an average-ish summer around Chicago. Can't rule out a cooler than average one, but I'd be leery about going too far in that direction given increased UHI around ORD (even compared to 10-20 years ago) and also with some of the tendencies that we have seen with warmth in the CONUS so far this year. A blistering hot summer looks pretty unlikely, but weather has a way of humbling so I wouldn't say it can't happen.

Yesterday it was dumping snow... today an IPA on the deck. Like it never happened.

Beautiful blue sky decorated with fluffy cumulus clouds. Lovely day