...to go somewhere else. Yesterday's final, official figure: 208 mm, a full 43 mm more than the rainfall that caused the record floods in August 1987.
And it's not over yet.
Today has set the record as the wettest day in Chicago history, and (a) it's only 11am and (b) more rain is coming:
Overnight rains that approached 178 mm over northern Cook County broke several impressive Chicago records. 176 mm of precipitation has been measured at O'Hare International Airport since Midnight making today, Chicago's wettest calandar day in modern weather history.
What happens when two air conditioners together draw more than 15 amps on a 15-amp circuit? This:
(Click to see full-size.)
The graph not only shows how quickly the place warmed up when the breaker tripped Wednesday evening, but also how slowly it cooled off once I closed the breaker. The initial cliff-like dive in temperature yesterday at 5:15pm happened because after turning the AC back on, I put a box fan next to the server rack and shut down two of the servers. You can see the temperature bumped up a degree when I turned them back on around 11:15pm.
So far today the servers are staying within their safe zone, under 27.5°C. The massive thunderstorms that just pushed through, which have kept the outside temperature under
24°C so far today, has helped. Tomorrow, however, the forecast calls for
34°C again.
How long until October?
It appears the air conditioners back at IDTWHQ have failed, while I'm 1,700 km away:
The chart starts at 7pm Chicago time Tuesday. The squiggle shows the backup air conditioner cycling on and off while it's in "energy saving" mode. That stops around 2pm yesterday, when, I imagine, the backup failed. Then, at 8:30pm last night, the main seems to have stopped.
I'll be leaving San Antonio on an earlier flight. I just hope the A/C units have simply stopped, and that they'll start again when I turn them on. Chicago's forecast calls for a high of 34°C today only going down to 24°C overnight. But without cooling, Inner Drive's poor servers may not last another two hours...
Chicago has seen its hottest temperatures in years this week, with more coming today:
Not since July 24, 2005 when O'Hare hit 39°C and a reading of 40°C occurred at Midway, has a triple-digit [Fahrenheit] reading occurred at the city's two observation sites. The entire 83 year observational record at Midway includes only 84 38°C or higher temperatures—and just 26 have occurred in the nearly half-century period since 1960.
Good thing I'm not in Chicago this week. No, I'm in San Antonio, where the temperature has stayed a cool and delightful 37°C. Every day. Except yesterday, when it rained for half an hour.
I fully expect this business trip to balance out in January when I get sent to Manitoba.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the 1981-2010 temperature normals this week, and guess what? They're warmer:
Normals serve as a 30 year baseline average of important climate variables that are used to understand average climate conditions at any location and serve as a consistent point of reference. The new normals update the 30-year averages of climatological variables, including average temperature and precipitation for more than 7,500 locations across the United States. This once-a-decade update will replace the current 1971–2000 normals.
In the continental United States, every state’s annual maximum and minimum temperature increased on average. “The climate of the 2000s is about 1.5 degree F warmer than the 1970s, so we would expect the updated 30-year normals to be warmer,” said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., NCDC director.
Like the myth of heliocentrism before it, the myth of anthropogenic climate change will stand forever disproven!
(Yet, it moves...)
Last night Chicago got hit by severe storms that included hurricane-force winds:
Violent storms raked large sections of the Chicago area Tuesday evening, knocking power out to nearly a quarter million Chicago area residents and transforming some thoroughfares into darkened obstacle courses, hard to navigate with streetlights out and debris, ranging from large trees to power poles and garbage cans, impeding if not entirely blocking travel. Police in some of the hardest hit areas were forced to light flares to mark fallen trees.
Eyewitnesses reported seeing transformers exploding at the height of the storms while others described some neighborhoods as "war zones" after the onslaught of storms.
... The storms generated gusts as high as 130 km/h at Wheeling and 120 km/h at Peru, Elmhurst and Wheaton.
I was inside, as you can imagine, as the storms ran over my part of the city, with horizontal rain and, well, lots of wind. At one point I watched the groundskeepers at US Cellular Field blown around as they tried to get the tarp over the infield.
Ah, global warming.
Summer begins today at 12:16 CDT, which is good because I'm tired of this 32°C spring weather.
My objection to the past three months of Chicago weather probably sounds familiar: we've either had too little or too much heat, and during warm afternoons, when someone might want to sit outside and have a beer, we've had instead crashing rain. Today's forecast sounds just like that, too.
On the other hand, it beats this...
A huge temperature change putting Chicago in perspective, from HamWeather (degrees Celsius):
(And now for my Luddite readers, the same map in Fahrenheit:)
In the last 24 hours, Chicago's temperature has plunged from an asphalt-melting 35°C to a shiver-inducing 12°C:
(The chart shows degrees Celsius along the left and local time along the bottom.)
The drop right before 9am caught me by surprise. When I left the house (and it was 19°C outside), the polo and jeans I have on seemed appropriate. Three hours later, with Weather Bug reporting 10°C at the nearest station and O'Hare reporting 12°C, I really wish I'd brought a jacket to work.
WGN points out that the last three days comprise the hottest early-season heat wave since 1933.
Glad that's over...
Update, 12:39 CT: Weather Bug now reports 9°C at the Latin School, but O'Hare is holding steady at 12°C.