Time of day when we talked to Dave Fraser, Fox thirty one's chief meteorologist for Weather Wednesday. We have a different producer on the board, and we don't he doesn't know where Dave's open is. Is that not Dave on the phone?
Shannon? Oh wait, hang on, Dave, if you're out there, call us, call me. Is that him?
Okay, never mind, Dave Fraser, Welcome to Weather Wednesday.
How you doing, my friend? I'm good.
I can't hear you, though, I think we do have a bad connection. Shannon couldn't hear me either.
I can hear you.
Can you hear me barely? So I'll just try and listen intently and talk.
I will speak to you like I am in a foreign country, trying to make sure they understand me.
Do you hear the words coming out of my mouth exactly?
Let's talk about the weather this week. What do we have looking to look forward to?
Okay, I heard that question a little bit. So we do have to look forward to a chance for showers and thunderstorms today. Yesterday was disappointing. Anybody watched me on the air yesterday knows how disappointing it was. We woke up yesterday morning with like ninety three percent humidity. Yeah, probably something everybody noticed, and we had just the perfect ingredients to capitalize on that moisture and get caught up
on the lack of rain that we've seen in July. Unfortunately, we just couldn't get things going because the clouds kept the temperatures down and then the wind turned to the wrong direction and was downsloping, and so we got a big old goose egg yesterday up and down the Front Range. While eastern and southeastern Colorado had won two inch rain totals. Today the humidity levels are not as high, but there's
still decent so there's still good moisture. And I do think covering around day three to six o'clock up and down the Front Range, it will be scattered storms, slow movers, and because of the humidity and the slow movement, there can be some pockets of heavy rain. Hopefully it's beneficial rain and not a problematic rain where it causes flooding. That is always a concern, but generally we get the soak it in, so watch out for ponding, watch out
for standing water and small streams and creaks. If it rained heavy in your area, could come up. You know, we're not talking flash flooding like you know we saw back in Texas, but small streams, creeks, little rivers can come up a little bit. So just be on the lookout for that. Good news. As we say in the eighties, strong chances are there on Thursday and Friday, but they start to drop off so that by the weekend we're dried. Heading back into the nineties.
Okay, I've got a question for you.
Hi, Mandy, if you have time, please ask Dave about corn sweat.
We just returned from the Senior.
Olympic Games in Des Moines, Iowa, and the corn was sweating. Heat index was one hundred and eighteen when my husband was competing, miserable, but he still took second place.
Oh congratulations to him. You know, I don't know that I've worked in Des Moines. I don't know that I've heard the term corn sweat, but I think I can to visualize what you're talking about, and yeah, you're talking about a heat index and high humidity, something we don't
have to deal with here. As a matter of fact, the heat index in Colorado, because of our semiary climate, generally runs five degrees below what the air temperature is because evaporation is how your body cools, and so when you have high humidity and you're in an area like de More in Iowa where your humidity values can you know, it could be ninety five degrees out with a ninety
percent humidity. Your body is trying to sweat to cool you down, but because the air is so thick and moisture laden the humidity, the sweat just stays on your body. You can't cool down where our environment as our body sweats, the evaporation process removes the sweat from us. That's a
cooling process and that actually feels cooler here. So yeah, definitely sweating it out in the Midwest with the temperatures that they've been having and the heat indexes that they've been seeing out there all the way into the Upper Midwest as well.
I use the Google and corn sweat is a term for the process of evapo transporation in cornfields where corn lands, yeah, release water vapor into the atmosphere as they absorb water from the ground and use it for growth in other processes. This increases the humidity, especially in the Midwest corn belt.
So that's the thing we know now.
That Yeah, so again, I had not heard of the term corn sweat, but avappot transporation is exactly that plants do grab ground soil and they can add you think about a thick canopy of a forest or a tropical area, or certainly corn which uses water and that moisture then evaporates into the eric can raise the humidity levels around those kind of environments.
Here's one for you, make sure.
Dave mentions this is the anniversary week of both nineteen seventy six Estes Park and nineteen ninety seven Fort Collins floods. Something about this time of year in Colorado? Is there something about this time of year in Colorado?
Generally? There really isn't anything specific, But I would say generally speaking, you're at the seventy six you're talking about the big Thompson flood. We generally deal with slow moving thunderstorms, and so at this time of the year, we can't have monsoon moisture in play. Like I said yesterday, our due point. You and I talked about due points before.
It's a measurement of moisture in the air. Obviously, for US thirties and forties is comfortable, but when we get into the fifties as Colorado's we start to feel it when you think of due points in the sixties, and higher Midwest can have due points in the seventies. That's that thick, thick air that we talk about all the time. Yesterday morning, our due point was at sixty six degrees. That's high for us. Today it's like fifty one. So at this time of the year you can have copious
moisture that can feed into moving thunderstorms. If they go over a certain terrain like the big Thompson Canyon and they double a lot of water upstream, you can have these flooding events. So that's why I said today is one of these events where we'll keep an eye out for some flooding. We always watch the burn scars like the Cameron Peak off to the west and the Alexander Mountain. Those tend to be a little more susceptible, so we'll
monitor all that today. Overall, I don't think it's a huge thread, but it is something worth.
Watching, just as a point of order.
Dave, the due point in Fort Myers, Florida as today is seventy six degrees.
Dear Lord.
Yeah, So I love Colorado because of our semi arid climate. You know, I grew up in the northeast, you grew up on the southeast. We all know what humidity a well, when you've lived here for you know, as long as I have and as long as you have, and you get so comfortable with our environment and just how great it is to be out and about and not have to deal with that, and then you go back and visit family and you step off the plane, it's like, yeah, it hits you like a wall.
In case you were wondering how that translates right now, ninety three percent humidity in Fort Myers Daveney.
That's what we were yesterday morning. Yesterday morning am, we had a ninety three percent humidity.
It was gross. I walked my dog in it. It was disgusting, all right, Dave Fraser. One last question, Hi, Mandy. Last night up in Wyoming, we had a severe thunderstorm watch issued from like six pm to midnight. What's the That's the latest this Texter could ever remember having a watch issued.
Is that out of the norm.
It's not out of the norm, but it was a little late that I was tracking those storms and watching them too, because I was concerned late last night. They were kind of moving in an easterly direction, and I was concerned that maybe they would take a southeasterly turn and move into northern Colorado. We just had a situation yesterday with the setup of the thick clouds and the high humidity that the storms were. There was a lot of outflow boundaries. Yesterday we talked about outflows that were
flying around and they were just triggering additional storms. And once they get going, they take a little while. Because they were slow movers. They did linger a little longer last night. And by the way, the skies were electric. When we talk about those nighttime storms we talk about nocturnal lightning. The skies were electric in Wyoming. They were electric out on the eastern planes for hours and hours,
almost continuous lighting. So it was just a set up yesterday where the slow movement and the sun coming out in some areas triggered pretty good storms and then the outflows took over. We tracked when coming back to Denver last night after eleven o'clock, and I was thinking maybe if our fingers crossed, we might be able to trigger something along it. It never did. It just kind of
washed out as it got close to the city. So I hopes today that we get the rain we need, just watch out for that flooding possibility that I mentioned, and then we'll get it dry as we head into the weekend, and welcome in the month of August.
On Friday and end of that, Dave Frasier, Fox thirty one's chief meteorologist, thanks for making time for us again on Weather Wednesday.
All right, take care, many tis all right, every one day.
We'll be right back