Break out the sunscreen this weekend — and be ready to leave it out for June, if the National Weather Service’s forecast of the upcoming weather turns out to be accurate.
The federal agency predicted Memorial Day weekend will be sunny and warm to hot, peaking on Sunday in the mid-80s in central Vermont, according to Seth Kutikoff, a meteorologist with the service.
And early analyses looking into June — and even the summer as a whole — suggest that Vermont is in for a hot summer. The state will likely have above normal temperatures for this summer, compared with the past few decades, according to the weather service.
The prediction, Kutikoff said, is based on broad atmospheric trends such as upper air patterns and the behavior of El Nino, the weather phenomenon that causes a band of warm water in the Pacific Ocean. The service also reviews climate change’s likely effects on year-to-year weather, which experts say is generally going to cause hotter summers with more extreme swings in temperature and precipitation.
“When we’re on a seasonal basis, the ability to pinpoint how warm we are going to be — we’re not able to do that,” he said. “Just that, on average, during those three months, temperatures certainly look like they’ll be above normal.”
Kutikoff cautioned that while air temperatures may rise this weekend, water temperatures will remain lower.
“For instance, in Lake Champlain the water temperature is roughly 50 to 55 (degrees), which still is cold enough to cause shock,” he said. “Any temperature below 60 can be quite dangerous.”