‘Absurd’ precipitation and oppressive humidity define New England summer of 2023

By Terry Eliasen, WBZ-TV meteorologist and executive weather producer

Ah, summer 2023.

If it isn’t him high rain, it is oppressively humid. On days when we are lucky enough to see sunlight, there is bushfire smoke in the air. The remaining images so far from this summer in New England: faded, Floods or damaged roadsAnd swollen/raging rivers and brown, smoky skies.

Makes you long for the good dry days of fashion, doesn’t it?

Take a look at the rainfall totals over the last 30 days. Yes, we’re now starting to map precipitation totals that look like snowfall forecasts, just another fun fact for summer 2023!

These numbers represent the total rainfall over the entire summer, if not more. Fifteen inches of water in parts of New England over the past thirty days is about a third of the average over an entire year!

In July alone (and we’re almost halfway through the month) we’ve seen ridiculous rainfall totals. You typically only see monthly totals like these in years when we experience a tropical storm or hurricane.

Worcester is creeping into its wettest July on record.

The real kick in the pants was the timing of so much rain this summer. I don’t have to tell you that my weekends were rough. It has rained on nine of the 14 weekend days in Boston since June 1.

I suppose you could say this is payback for last summer when the exact opposite happened.

And then, finally, you get a dry day, and not only does it come Monday, we get hazy, smoke-filled skies.

Yes, the smoke from the Canadian wildfires is back.

We don’t expect any major air quality concerns on Tuesday, but there will be a brown haze in the air at times.

Monday will likely be the hottest day of the week.

Tuesday we’ll be back again Watch the radar In the afternoon for a few heavy showers/thunderstorms, mainly west of Boston and I-495. Nothing is as widely influential as Sunday.

Wednesday looks like a dry day with low humidity as well – something very rare this summer!

but. . . The pattern returns late in the week. Rain and storms are expected late Thursday into Friday. This is the next important period of weather to watch as there may be another round of heavy rain and localized flooding.

We are cautiously optimistic about next weekend at this point. It looks like Friday’s unstable weather won’t extend into the weekend. We’ll have more on this timing in the coming days!