July weather brought a little bit of everything to Illinois.
It was slightly cooler last month, but that doesn’t tell the whole story says state climatologist Trent Ford.
Ford said, “We had several nights where the temperature dipped into the 50s, which is a relative rarity anymore in July, and that was quite pleasant due to lack of humidity, but then we paid for that the last week of July where temperatures exceeded 90 degrees and, in fact, exceeded 100 degrees in a couple of places, and combined with really high humidity.”
At the Salem Water Treatment Plant, the high temperature of the month was 101 on July 29th and the low was 62 recorded on July 9th, 10th, and 22nd. Rainfall for the month was 3.51 inches, with the big storms missing the water plant. The highest one-day total was 95-hundredths of an inch. For the first seven months of the year, precipitation was 26.05 inches. That compares to 9.87 inches of rain last July and a year-to-date total of rainfall of 33.57 inches.
There was considerably more rain in Centralia, where 6.56 inches of rain fell in July bringing the total for the year to 26.78 inches.
Last month ended up being the 22nd wettest July on record in Illinois, with rainfall about an inch above normal. Most of that was in Southern Illinois and the Chicago area, where seven to eight inches of rain fell and thousands of basements flooded. Much of Northern and Central Illinois continued to see poor air quality days thanks to Canadian wildfire smoke and cleanup up from June’s derecho event continued into July.
