Hoosier

It probably won't come as a surprise that this will be the warmest opening 10 days of July in Chicago since 2012.

Covid hospitalizations have been increasing in Indiana, though not at a dramatic rate and there is still plenty of bed availability. Current hospitalizations are the highest they have been since the 3rd week of June. It would largely be too early to see any impact from the 4th of July on the hospitalization numbers because of the typical time lag with this illness so hopefully there isn't a sharper rise on the way.

Love that video.

Can see the flattening and upward move starting in the 7 day avg on worldometers. Probably a similar look on the other tracking sites (or will be soon)

3 days in a row of 900+. Wish we could say it's all because of the weekend lag but I don't think so. It looks like we have reached the point where the increases in several states are outweighing the declines in other states.

I see that Buffalo got to 98. Very impressive for that area.

So much rain until a week or two ago and the grass is already starting to get brown. Amazing how little time it takes.

12z Euro was ridiculously hot south of I-80. It actually has maxes near/over 110F for a few days in eastern MO. Color me skeptical about that magnitude of heat. There were a few isolated spots in the Ohio Valley that hit 110F back in 2012, but you need pretty extraordinary dry conditions to pull that off.

July 1921 was pretty warm... I recognize that month locally as well from past research

91 at ORD. Put it on the board.

Yeah, could very well get there around October at the rate we're going. Was trying to not be so pessimistic but it's a real possibility. If the schools are going to reopen, you gotta knock the cases way, way down. Some countries overseas have been able to open schools and not have big problems so far. Imagine trying to open school right now in Florida, Texas, Arizona with so much virus floating around.

Flu death rate isn't 0.6% 0.1%, 0.2%, 0.4%, 0.6%, etc. all sounds pretty similar to each other but is actually fairly significantly different when you are talking about millions of cases. Regardless of what the death rate is, we have like 130k dead and seemingly headed to 200k by winter.

1999 was sort of an exception to the dry rule. It hit 101 on July 30. May and June weren't dry and neither was July... there was only about a week prior to July 30 that was dry. But generally speaking, you definitely want it more dry than that.

Obviously not going to predict 100 in Chicago yet, but I'll feel better about the prospects if we get through the next several days without a large amount of rain and the models keep showing what they are currently showing. ORD has started to dry out lately and by the time this round of heat comes, it *could* be about 2-3 weeks of being on the dry side. Historically, a lot of Chicago's 100+ degree days have happened during significant drought or at least when not having much rain in the preceding couple of weeks.

Does it have 110F anywhere?

I think Wednesdays are usually part of the weekend lag, and could be even more in this case because of the holiday weekend. The weekly average will give us a better idea. I do get the sense that the national decline in deaths is ending and it's a question of how big the rise gets.

Today was the 12th consecutive day with a high of 85+ at ORD. Some of these non-round number streaks can start to get silly, but the 85+ one has some significance because it's basically the cutoff of what the highest average high temp is in Chicago. Other top 85+ degree streaks below. All of them occurred after the official observation site moved inland (first to Midway and then O'Hare). This year's streak should end up high on the list. #of days, ending date 21, 7/9/1949 16, 7/23/1983 15, 7/22/2005 15, 7/13/1966 14, 8/9/1988 14, 8/8/1983 14, 7/11/1955 14, 6/22/1954 13, 7/9/2012 13, 6/25/1995 13, 5/25/1977 (impressively early one) 13, 6/21/1956 13, 9/3/1953 13, 8/14/1947 12, 7/2/1964 12, 8/30/1959 12, 8/5/1955

Have not looked at it at all but there's a slight risk from Lake Michigan westward tomorrow.

For sure. Solid/persistent signals in the guidance on the large scale. As you said, it's the details that are up for grabs. Many times there are attempts to build big heights northward in the extended that ends up getting thwarted by convective clusters, so that is a risk to keep an eye on especially with northward extent.

Ridge was shunted, so some southward displacement of the heat on this run compared to 00z.

Looks like another torch run incoming on the 12z Euro... at least so far.

Now just gotta figure out some way for BUF to hit 100 this summer. The most impossible of tasks.

Indiana has been running less tests per day lately, and the positive percentage has been creeping up. I mentioned that the state was testing all nursing home employees in June, so perhaps that explains the recent drop in number of tests being performed.

Flirting with 1000 today. Hopefully just a data dump and won't start seeing more days like it in the coming weeks.

The thing I want to know is what percentage of people have the symptoms for many weeks/months. You hear these stories about people who can't seem to shake it, but it's hard to get a sense of how common that is... like are we talking 5%, 10%, 20%?