All professions seem to have their own language, most of it inscrutable. What’s impressed me about meteorology is their ability to take seemingly innocuous plain words and string them together in ways to make them terribly confusing. While doing a little digging to figure out just what’s been going on with the weather these last couple of weeks I came across the phrase “cut-off low”.

Apparently all of our moist, tropical air we’ve been (not really) enjoying is thanks to the jet stream, which has made up its mind this year to take an exceptionally strange dip southward across the plains. This leaves a path for the heat and moisture to stream northward into New England. A Weather Underground map from yesterday shows it pretty well.

Not only is the dip odd, but the fact that the jet stream is staying like this for several weeks is striking forecasters as peculiar as well. This is setting us up for what we’ve seen for the last week or two, hot muggy days with the ability to build thunderstorms, the late summer tropical kind with torrential rain only fun to play in when you’re young.

Working, not so much.

Last night’s storm, however, was a cut-off low. Cut off, it seems, from the jet stream. While it should have missed us altogether, instead it meandered up north and east, dumping an impressive amount of rain in northern New York (the forecast called for it to be over us, but it stayed a little to the west).

Now it is going to poke around Quebec for a while, probably exiting out the Saint Lawrence seaway at some point, once it gets caught back up again in the jet stream. The dip is forecast to be around for a while, so the rest of the week we’re looking at more warm, muggy, tropical August weather. We got .75″ of rain last night, bringing June up to 5.47″ of rain. Last year June had 2.3″ of rain, two years ago 3.1″. That’s why my boots aren’t drying out anytime soon.