The prairie lands are healthy and the wild sunflowers were starting their late summer bloom, as seen in this photo taken on August 27 at the Rotary Arboretum in southwest Lawrence.

Monthly July and August, 2017, data for Lawrence are below, with July on the left side and August on the right.  The ‘LWC’ column is the value at the Lawrence Airport.  ‘Norm’ is the normal value at the Lawrence Airport.  ‘PWS’ is the value from my personal weather station at my residence near Inverness Drive and Clinton Parkway.  The airport, being on the flood plain in the country, is generally going to run cooler than readings in town.  For example, in July, my mean temperature was 2.5 degrees warmer than the airport.   In August, my mean temperature was 3.1 degrees warmer than the airport.

JULY                 LWC          Norm       PWS;         AUG        LWC        Norm        PWS

Avg Max          90.5           89.5           92.3;         Avg Max  83.5          89.4          85.5

Avg Min           68.5           67.2           71.8;         Avg Min   60.5         65.2          64.7

Mean                79.5           78.3           82.0;         Mean       72.0          77.3          75.1

Max                101/22nd             103/22nd;         Max       92/19th                  96/19th

Min                   58/3rd                     62/1st;          Min        51/4th                    56/4th

Mx >= 90             17            15.1            21;           Mx >=90     4          14.1           6

Rainfall            3.24           4.18           3.28;               Missing              4.33        8.48

While July was a bit on the warm side with a mean temperature at the airport 1.2 degrees above normal, August came in quite cool with a mean temperature for the month a whopping 5.3 degrees below normal.

Temperatures will vary considerably in town from one spot to the next depending on the surroundings and exposure of the instruments, but will generally be warmer due to a city ‘heat island effect,’ among other factors.  I make no particular claim that my readings are ‘more accurate,’ but this table gives some idea of the difference in summer between what might occur in a residential area of town compared to the rural Lawrence Airport location.   Your results may vary.

Precipitation-wise, the July 7-station average rainfall in Lawrence came in nearly an inch low – about 78 percent of normal – despite some very heavy events in the immediately surrounding area.   In August, the 7-station city average came in at 8.48 inches, or 196 percent of normal, nearly 5 inches of which fell in the ‘Post Eclipse Storm’ of the night of August 21st-22nd (described in an earlier post).

Due to entirely missing precipitation at the airport on August 5, when about three inches fell, the NWS called the August rainfall as missing.  For the PWS rainfall in the table above, I used the Lawrence 7-station average from the CoCoRaHS Network.   The values from my 4-inch ‘official gauge’ – one of the reporting sites in the Lawrence 7-station average – were 3.28 inches in July and 8.43 inches in August.