Sticky Day

[John Hudson]

Lots of humidity in southern Manitoba today, shattering old records......
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/warnings/SWS_bulletins_e.html

John
www.skywatch7.com

 

[Jonathan Behle]

This reminds me of something I read recently online and in the newspapers.. It was about how cornfields in the Midwest help cause humidity levels to be higher then they otherwise would be. Personally, I wonder if that doesn't have somewhat of an effect on what is going on in the Northern Plains and into Manitoba with some of these humidity readings we have going on..

I hope this corn and humidity correlation wasn't brought up on another thread...

 

[James Hammett]

It was about how cornfields in the Midwest help cause humidity levels to be higher then they otherwise would be.

It's called evapotranspiration:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evapotranspiration

 

[Joel Wright]

With the corn (and other crops) being mainly hybrid now, it'd be interesting to somehow be able to measure how the evapotranspiration rate has gone up over the past 50 years.

It seems as though the corn plants are getting taller every year. I would think this would have a huge impact on evapotranspiration.

 

[Karen Politte]

It was about how cornfields in the Midwest help cause humidity levels to be higher then they otherwise would be. I hope this corn and humidity correlation wasn't brought up on another thread...

The process by which growing vegetation and/or very wet soil improves humidity values in the lower atmosphere is called evapotranspiration and it is sometimes a significant factor in the Plains during chase season. Many chasers are known to take evapotranspiration into account when formulating their forecasts for a particular day. Evapotranspiration is especially marked in the months of June and July in the more northerly Plains states of South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota, when the heavy MCS rains of mid-spring have given way to vast crops of cornfields that are blanketed with fog every morning in the summertime......such conditions - although sometimes overhyped and over-relied upon when forecasting for tornadoes - certainly cannot be ignored.

Speaking of fog, here at home in the slightly-SE-US, we have had a couple of weeks of amazing July weather. Heavy, flooding rains soaked the ground thoroughly in early July - making up for spring drought that we had. The result was a very wet earth which led to waking up at 6.00am to the first light, and thick, Fall-like foggy conditions for the past two weeks. Very nice to see in comparison to last July's searing, unforgiving heat!

KL