June 2004 Saint Cloud Weather Summary

Will It Stop Raining? Oh, It Did....

With all of the rain and clouds, one might expect that June would have colder than normal. The Saint Cloud average temperature was 63.0°F, 2.1°F below normal. However, temperatures were actually near normal through the end of the rainy period on the 16th. Because the thunderstorms were triggered by warm, humid air, the high temperature exceeded 75°F on 10 of the 16 days, including hitting a record-breaking 96°F on June 7th. In addition, the high humidity kept low temperatures in the 50's to low 60's through much of the rainy period. However, the dry out was caused by a northwesterly flow pattern that brought several surges of cool air from northwestern Canada into Minnesota. Between the 17th and the 28th, high temperatures never were higher than 77°F and included several near record cold readings. The average high for this period was 70.4°F and the average low was 48.0°F. These temperatures are more representative of mid-May rather than the second half of June.

Junes as cold as this past month have been rare in recent Saint Cloud history. In the past 11 years, only June 2000 was cooler than June 2004. Since 1969, June 2004 ranks as the 6th (out of 35) coolest with only the Junes of 1985, 1992, 1993, and 2000 were cooler. In Saint Cloud weather records, June 2004 ranks as the 25th coolest out of 124 years.

So, now what? Beats me! We have returned to the warmer and more humid pattern for the second half of this week, but there still are northwest steering winds in Canada. Currently, the long-range forecast shows a series of cold fronts pushing southward from the weekend into the first half of next week. While they do show a major potential warm-up after that, the track record of these forecasts have been poor. In addition, the trend this week has been to try and make it warm up, but the weekend forecasts have been getting cooler every day, so I tend to believe the cooler forecasts.