June Outlook

Happy Summer! Meteorological Summer starts today, which only has to do with record-keeping. June, July, and August are considered "summer" so we can keep clean records, but technically our seasons are determined by astronomy. The summer solstice happens on June 21 this year, and we will talk more about that as it gets closer.

Today our focus is on what kind of weather to expect through the month of June. The Climate Prediction Center releases these monthly outlooks which are based on probabilities of temperatures and precipitation being above or below normal. So first, we need to establish what is normal during the month of June. According to the National Weather Service in Louisville, the normal maximum temperature in June is 85.7°, the normal minimum temperature is 67.2°, and the normal average temperature is 76.4°. Normal rainfall for the month is 4.27"; all of those numbers are based on climatological "normals" from the last 30 years (1991-2020).

Now we can look at what these maps are trying to tell us. The CPC gives a 33%-40% chance of above normal temperatures for the month for part of our area, including Louisville and all of our Indiana counties. Remember, this doesn't mean the high temperature every day will be "warmer than normal", but that when we look back on the entire month of June, they expect it to be near or slightly above those normal values we broke down above.

At this point there are equal chances of rainfall ending up either above or below normal for our area, but the shading for slightly below normal is closer to us than the one for slightly above normal. Up in Michigan and the Great Lakes region, they're more heavily favored to be drier than normal, while New Mexico & Florida are expected to be above.

The first week of June in our area this year is pretty much set in stone. We've got a ton of sunshine coming up this work week and very little rain opportunities until maybe when we get toward the end of the weekend or early next week.