Warm, but not too warm. Dry, with few events rained out. And dazzling sunshine, day after day.
Some are calling it the best summer we’ve had in a long time.
“It was wonderful,” said Rachel Colegrove of North Tonawanda. “Perfect!”
Not a single outdoor concert on her busy schedule was rained out. It was the perfect weather to enjoy the beach and farmers markets. And she was able to do plenty of hiking, camping and fishing – making it just the type of summer she dreams about.
It was good for business, too.
Just ask Michael Pettys, manager of the Beach Club at Mickey Rats in Angola.
“It was phenomenal. It really was,” he said. “We beat sales records for the eighth year in a row.”
That is despite a “really bad” start to the season during the cold and rainy spring.
“When it’s 60 degrees and people are wearing sweatshirts to the beach, there’s not much you can do with that,” he said.
But June ended up being the eighth warmest on record.
“It was bright and sunny, and there was a nice stretch in between rain days,” Pettys said. “Because even if we get a little bit of rain in the morning, we’re done. People don’t come out.”
July was also the fourth driest on record.
That is great if you’re playing in a golf tournament, but not so great if you’re the person keeping the greens watered.
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After a historically bad spring, Rolling Hills Par 3 golf course in Chaffee had a historically good summer in terms of the number of rounds of golf played at the course.
But it took a lot of labor to keep the course watered and healthy looking.
“So from a business standpoint, yes, it’s been remarkable, wonderful,” said owner Jason Kline. “From a golf course owner standpoint, the drought has caused a lot of headache, a lot of grief and a lot of work for the groundskeepers and for the owners.”
Rolling Hills Par 3 is self-sufficient with its own 5-acre pond. But watering needs to be done before golfers begin teeing up for the day – usually at the crack of dawn or earlier.
“Not only that, you also have the component of beating up the golf course,” Kline said. “The divots on the golf course, it’s very hard to make them heal without water. So we were watering everything far more than we’ve ever had to.”
But the predominantly dry days and nights helped Brownie’s Custard Stand, which has locations in Olcott and Wilson, have a banner year.
“We’re a completely outdoor venue, so there’s no inside seating area if it rains,” owner Greg Stennis said.
And despite the summer’s consistent warmth, there were very few days calling for extreme heat advisories – another good thing in the ice cream business.
“On really hot days, nobody goes out. If we’re in the 90s, above 90, nobody’s coming for ice cream. It’s too hot out,” he said. “You would think that’s not the case. But it seems like when it’s really, really hot, it tapers off a little bit.”
But the area is paying for all that dry weather. The region is in the midst of a moderate drought, said Jim Mitchell, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Buffalo office. That’s not good for farmers, and something people are hoping to see remedied as fall begins.
It doesn’t take much to get everybody talking about the weather. Right now it’s all about how hot and dry it is here in Western New York. Then, after the laments about sweltering nights and wilting gardens, a few questions start coming to mind.
“The rest of September looks above average as far as temperatures go right now,” Mitchell said, looking at Climate Prediction Center data. “Oct. 1, it looks like above average temperatures. And rainfall near to below normal. So the trend there continues.”
Even if it hasn’t been the best for farmers’ crops, the warm, dry weather can be a key contributor to the mental health of Western New Yorkers – especially for those who live with seasonal affective disorder, which is a type of depression that occurs during certain seasons of the year, typically in the fall and winter.
The extended sunny, warm weather is likely to contribute to positive mental health outcomes as Western New York settles into autumn, said Nicole Slootsky, deputy director of the New York State Office of Mental Health.
“It encourages people to be outside. And we know that the sunshine, that vitamin D, it has such an impact on people’s well-being and their opportunities to fight the depression and fight the anxiety that sometimes even just the weather can cause,” she said.
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Samantha Christmann
News Business Reporter
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