Severe Thunderstorm Watch #441 was just issued for all of SE Wisconsin, including Kenosha.

At 5:00pm CDT storms are beginning to fire here in SE WI. The action should pick up as the evening progresses and the cold front begins to move through. The main threat this evening will be large hail and damaging winds, but tornadoes can’t be ruled out.

My high temp at the house today was 94 with a heat index of 100. Yesterday’s high was 96. These are the two hottest days we’ve had in the 3 1/2 years that I’ve lived in Wisconsin.

Tomorrow the bottom drops out of the temps though. Thursday’s forecasted high in Kenosha, 58! We stay in the high 50′s to low 60′s for the next five days with rain chances 4 of the 5.

So much for summer.

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I guess it’s official, May was the payback month for the warm, sunny November we had last year. Most of May was more like fall than spring, with cool, cloudy and rainy weather. Here’s a rundown of the the month from my observations at home.

• Average High Temperature: 59 – 3 degrees below average
• Average Low Temperature: 45 – 3 degrees below average
• Highest High Temp: 85 on the 31st
• Lowest Low Temp: 34 on the 5th
• Precipitation total: 4.36 inches – 1.68 inches above average
• 15 of the 31 days had measurable precipitation
• No snow fell this month
• 1 Severe Thunderstorm Watch
• 1 Tornado Watch
• 1 Severe Thunderstorm Warning
• 5 days rated Slight Risk Severe Thunderstorms by the SPC
• 1 day rated Moderate Risk Severe Thunderstorms by the SPC
• We only had 2 days that were cloud free all day and night.
• 21 days were mostly cloudy or cloudy.

Here’s the link to my weather log: Kenosha WI, 12 Month Weather Log

Now we enter June, our biggest severe weather month, we’ll see what it brings. The next 5 day are forecast to continue the temperature roller coaster ride that we’ve been on the last couple weeks: 73, 59, 87, 85 & 70
Only two of these days have rain forecasted though.

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Severe weather didn’t quite materialize for us along Lake Michigan’s shore yesterday. The strongest storms, on the leading edge of the cold front, fell apart as they hit the cooler air along the lake. At the time the storms came in there was an 18 degree difference in temperature from the lake shore to 10 miles inland. That was enough to weaken the storms considerably.

We did get to see a nice shelf cloud as the leading edge of storms came in though. Here is a two image pano I shot from our balcony. Click the image to enlarge.

These storms were moving at 60-70 mph as they came through Kenosha County. I was expecting all hell to break loose after the shelf cloud passed, but it didn’t happen this time. I just missed an awesome lightning photo while shooting this pano. A large tangle of lightning appeared just above the trees and stayed there for about 5-10 seconds. More than enough time to take a picture, but I was moving to a new position and wasn’t ready for it.

We did end up with .55″ of rain last night and another .04″ this morning. Next system moves in on Tuesday night and Wednesday. It’s currently forecast to bring close to an inch of rain.

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A Severe Thunderstorm Warning has been issued for Kenosha County. The storm is about 30 min. out. Don’t think there’s to much of a risk for tornadoes here in Kenosha, but high winds and large hail is possible.

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