When the sky can’t decide what it wants, the air in St. Louis feels a certain way. Heavy, damp, and preventing something. It’s the kind of humidity that sticks to your skin before you’ve even made it to your car, and you can feel it as soon as you step outside on a Monday morning in early June. In this area, the forecast of 84 degrees and the possibility of showers hardly qualifies as news. Locals dismiss it with a shrug. They know that worse is likely to come because they have witnessed worse.
June’s effects on the Gateway City seem to be reflected in this week. There will be sporadic thunderstorms today, sunshine, and a brief decrease in humidity by Tuesday, followed by a gradual return to the high 80s by Thursday. Another round of storms arrives on Friday, making the weekend appear soggy. With overnight lows refusing to fall below the upper 60s, there is a chance of thunderstorms on both Saturday and Sunday. On paper, it’s not particularly dramatic. However, by July, the pattern of sun, storm, sun, storm wears people out.
Along with a severe thunderstorm watch and a flood warning, the National Weather Service office in St. Charles currently has a marginal severe weather risk on the board. It doesn’t scream emergency. It’s the summertime background noise of Missouri. Even so, the air quality index is currently at “poor” this morning—the kind of information that people usually ignore until their chest constricts while jogging through Forest Park. There is a lot of tree pollen. Dust and dander are also. To put it another way, the atmosphere is doing a bit too much at once.
Speaking with those who have lived here long enough, it seems like the weather in St. Louis has been getting stranger. That could be confirmation bias. The news cycle could be the cause. However, the heat seems to arrive earlier and the storms do seem to land harder than they used to. Even though June isn’t supposed to feel like late July, forecasters are tracking a heat wave that is already breaking records in other places and moving eastward. The humidity, the haze, and the way thunderheads build up over the bluffs in the late afternoon are all amplified by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
It’s difficult to ignore how casually people adjust. Before the storms arrive, patios fill up. Cardinals games continue. Someone always has an extra umbrella, and someone always forgets theirs. Due to generations of dealing with tornado warnings disrupting dinners and ice storms closing roads in February, the city has developed a sort of muscle memory for this weather. You learn to make haphazard plans. Before making any commitments, you check the radar.
In the midst of the gloom, astronomy enthusiasts have something to anticipate. This week, June’s full moon, known as the Strawberry Moon because of the brief wild strawberry harvest that used to coincide with this time of year, will rise along with a three-planet meetup that is worth seeing if the clouds part long enough. It remains to be seen if they will. They most likely won’t, at least not on the appropriate nights, according to the forecast through Monday of next week.
It’s amazing to see how much St. Louis life subtly depends on the weather as this develops. By the radar, builders plan pours. Sometimes within the same hour, coaches move practice indoors and then back out. Restaurants reroute patrons. Everyday decisions made in the city are predicated on the working assumption that the weather will most likely change before you’re done thinking about it. That assumption will continue to be accurate this week more than most.
