ST. LOUIS — July is supposed to be a really hot month around here. Statistically, it's our hottest month. So we would expect it to be pretty hot consistently. Would you believe it really wasn't ALL that hot?
We got a break over the last few days, including today, the final day of July. It was supposed to be incredibly hot today, with our second 100 degree day of the year forecast here in the Bi-State. But that didn't happen, thanks in part to cloud cover and cooler outflow winds from storms to our northeast.
We still managed to get to 91 degrees, though. With the significant humidity, this number felt a lot higher as the heat index readings reached over 100. But this 91 degree reading is only 1 degree above normal for the entire month. As we sit in the hottest period of the entire year for another week, this is actually pretty good!
That's the main reason this month hasn't really been ALL that hot. Average highs between 89-90 degrees for the entire month, and you can see, there were a lot of days close to average. In fact, there were several days that we were well below average. I think we can all recall that nice stretch of low humidity and temperatures from July 18-22.
One of the main reasons we never got really hot was because we had so much rain. This was the 6th wettest July on record in St. Louis.
We had nearly 8.5 inches of rain and Lambert, with many local amounts well in excess of 12" for the entire month. This was largely in part due to the extreme rainfall rates we can get this time of year, with two-thirds of this rain coming in just three of our 31 days this month.
After Aug. 7, our daily average temperature goes down and we inch our way to fall.
