Wet Hot American Summer

This summer still has more than two weeks to go and most people are ready to see the end of it. Some summers are scorchingly hot. Some are sickeningly humid. Some are bone-dry, drought years that it seems we will never recover from. Some are rainy, full of dismal days that lead kids to sing incantations to dispel the precipitation.

The best description for this summer in Northeastern Pennsylvania is tropical. Hot, humid, and rainy, with occasional small, tight knots of storms, some isolated deluges resulting in horrible localized flooding, and a few large regional storms. Temperatures since the end of June have generally been well above average, as has the precipitation and humidity.

How unusual is this? Unusual enough that around a dozen school districts have postponed the start of the school year due to mold. The heat and humidity inside the confines of a school building left vacant over the summer are apparently a great mix if you're looking to grow mold. This, as far as I know, has never happened here before.

It gets worse. Schools here have traditionally started in the cool early weeks of September , and ended in the warming days of early June. The school year spanned autumn, winter, and spring, with a few nominal weeks of summer thrown in in the beginning. The practical upshot of this is that schools normally have to be heated but not air-conditioned.

But not this year. This school year temperatures have been soaring into the 90s and above in the afternoon. Many schools in the area, not equipped with air conditioning, have been closing early due to excessive heat. This, too, as far as I know, has never happened before.

Now, a single data point does not create a line. A single year's weather doesn't indicate climate change. But this summer does not exist in isolation. There are many other data points that help to show the trend. It could be that wet, hot, tropical summers are the new normal for this area. Don't like it? Well, it might just be that there's nothing you can do about it, except move or get used to living in the tropics for a good bit of the year.