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Glenn Burns Weather
No sunspots
equal no rain
 I
was so optimistic during the first half of July because everything
seemed to be more favorable for persistent rainfall. A huge air mass
filled with tropical moisture covered the Southeast. Disturbances
were riding the upper level winds and moving into Georgia just about
every day. These were good sod-soaking rain makers. The rainfall in
the Lake Lanier basin on some of those good rain days sometimes
totaled two to three inches. Yet when we would check the lake level
in the days after good run-off should have occurred, the lake
continued to drop. Is it just me or do the laws of physics no longer
apply for the Lanier basin?
Well, now it’s August and we are fully engulfed in
the Dog Days of summer. We do not expect much in the way of
afternoon thunderstorm activity. We will see some but they will be
very far and few between. What we need is a tropical weather system
to dump about six to 12 inches of rain in north Georgia. With the
tropics now heading toward the peak of the hurricane season, that is
a distinct possibility.
When I was at the national conference for the
American Meteorological Society last month, I went on a little field
trip to NCAR, The National Center for Atmospheric Research, located
in Boulder, Colo. One of my areas of study is space weather. We had
a great instructor and the question I had for him was, “Did this
past record cold winter have anything to do with the sun’s output.”
The instructor told us it was most likely the biggest contributing
factor. He also told us that these global climate warming models
have mostly failed to take into consideration the fluctuating output
of the sun. He reminded us of the Maunder Minimum. It was a time of
extreme cold around the globe during the late 1600s and early 1700s.
It was so unusually cold that it actually snowed in New England in
July! So I asked what was going on with the sun during that time. He
said, “Absolutely nothing.” And that was the problem. There were no
sunspots during that time. We are now in the minimum of our sunspot
cycle. There are currently no sunspots and there were few, if any,
this past record cold and snowy winter. So, there seems to be a
director correlation of the sun’s energy output and our weather.
There is one problem however, nobody really understands the link!
And so it goes. Let’s all pray for rain, not only to
raise the lake level but to help out the lake’s supporting
businesses that have really taken it on the chin the past two
years.
Glenn Burns is chief meteorologist for WSB-TV in Atlanta.
glenn@lakesidenews.com
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