Nevada stays cool while much of the nation bakes

Tom Gardner

Monday, Aug. 2, 1999 | 8:55 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - While most of the nation baked in last month's deadly heat wave, Nevada's weather was cool to downright cold in the arid north while the south had lethal flooding and unusually mild temperatures.

"The episode in Clark County brought up to one-half of the normal annual rainfall in little over an hour at some locations," state Climatologist John James said on Monday. "One gauge recorded 2 inches in 75 minutes."

The July 8 deluge where the annual average barely tops 4 inches unleashed flooding that killed two people, smashed mobile homes and swept away hundreds of cars.

And nature wasn't done rewriting the record books yet.

In a city where temperatures sometimes don't fall below 100 degrees at night, readings reached 100 on only 15 days. The previous July record was 18 days. Normal is 26.

James said both anomalies were caused by moisture pulled into the southern part of the state from the Gulf of Mexico that produced an unusual amount of cloudiness and the catastrophic storms.

The rest of Nevada, which could use a little moisture, didn't get it.

"The northern two-thirds of the state are experiencing one of the driest summers on record with little or no rain since early June," James said.

The north also had temperatures ranging from a little below normal to freezing. James said some remote sensors in the northeast dipped into the mid-20s.

He said the conditions which spared Nevada from the unrelenting July heat that tortured the East and Midwest were due partly to the leftover effects of La Nina, the unusual cooling of water in the equatorial Pacific.

"Cool air is fairly stable and we had high pressure over the north that cut off the monsoonal rainfall before it got here," he said.

Reno's only rainfall last month was 0.1 inch in a brief but potent shower on Saturday. But while some roads were briefly flooded, James said he didn't get a drop at his house.

Elko could scare up only a trace in July and Winnemucca got 0.01 inch while Ely's 0.37 inch was wet by comparison, but barely half its average. Las Vegas ended up with 2.18 inches in a month that calls 0.35 of an inch normal.