By RUSS OLIVO

The strawberry crop has been a bust, but area farmers are hoping the rest of the summer will bring some respite from one of the dampest and most sun-starved growing seasons meteorologists can recall.

Chris Jaswell of Jaswell Farms in Smithfield counts his weather-related strawberry losses in the tons. The family farm off George Washington Highway produces some 20,000 pounds of strawberries in a good year, but this season the yield is probably off by half, according to Jaswell.
“They don’t like sitting in water,” he says.
There were a lot of superb berries in the field this season and farm workers picked as many of them as they could, said Jaswell. But a lot of them rotted on the plant because the inclement weather kept customers away from the farm’s most popular pick-your-own crop.
“It’s kind of disheartening a little bit ‘cause you work all year for it to sell it and market it,” he says. “You can’t get upset about it. It’s a challenging business to be in. Mother Nature is always throwing curveballs at us.”
But the weather hasn’t been a flop for all the fruits. The blueberry crop is looking good, says Jaswell. And the apples are weirdly premature. While they won’t ripen until fall,  Jaswell says the abundance of moisture has put them about a month ahead of schedule, size-wise.
Josie Morse of the Big Apple Farm in Wrentham, Mass., is usually inviting customers in to pick their own raspberries by now, but she says they’re still green because of a lack of sunshine.
“They’re looking pretty good but right now they just need a little sunshine to ripen up,” she says. “They’re about a week behind.”
Since the end of May, southeastern New England has endured one of the longest stretches of dreary, overcast weather that many can remember, with temperatures significantly below normal. But the meteorologic capper came on Wednesday and Thursday, when thunderstorms bearing torrential rains and dangerous lightning strikes bore down on the region. Lightning killed a fisherman in South County, fried the electrical system of a house in Harrisville and blew the steeple off a church in Medway, Mass.
It turns out that temperatures for the month of June ran nearly 9 degrees below average and rainfall checked in at just over 3 inches, far above normal, though somewhat less than the 1915 record, according to the National Weather Service.
Arthur Cadoret, a longtime meteorologist from Cumberland who works for
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radio station WNRI, says he cannot recall a season that bears any resemblance to this one in over four decades.
“It was either the summer of 1967 or 1968, it was pretty close to this,” said Cadoret. “That’s the only other summer in my lifetime I can remember being this dismal.”
That summer, said Cadoret, you could get up on any given morning thinking it was a beach day but the skies would cloud over before noon and stay overcast until mid-afternoon, when the clouds bunched up and produced showers or thunderstorms. Once again, says Cadoret, he feels like a broken record this season when he broadcasts his forecast in the morning. At the radio station, he’s got a new nickname: Mr. Dismal.
It’s all giving him a case of weatherman guilt. Every time he predicts another dreary day, he thinks of frustrated farmers and backyard gardeners, of the drowned-out hopes of vacationers who plunked down $900 for a week in Matunuck.
“I can’t put a happy face on this,” says Cadoret. “I start thinking about what I just said.”
The reason we’re in this atmospheric rut is a phenomenon called the “North Atlantic oscillation,” says the veteran forecaster, who learned his trade in the Air Force over 50 years ago. The term describes a “great big high pressure area” parked over the Atlantic Ocean somewhere around Iceland, says Cadoret. The problem is, that’s not usually where it’s located this time of year and it’s functioning “like a wall” that keeps storms locked in place over the Northeastern U.S. instead of letting them pass from west to east as quickly as they normally do.
Charley Foley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass., describes the same phenomenon in different terms. He says the jet stream, a powerful S-shaped current of air that sucks weather systems into the region all the way from the Pacific coast, is tracking north of New England — something it doesn’t ordinarily do this time of year. In its current position, the jet stream inhibits precipitation-laden, low-pressure systems from churning out of the region as quickly as they normally would. Instead, the clouds tend to linger.
If the jet stream wobbled south a bit, weather systems would move through the region more rapidly, allowing the skies to clear up and the sun to poke through in between the cloudy, damp periods, a pattern more typical of summer.
Even if the short-term forecast isn’t entirely sunny, the next few days look somewhat drier, at least, than the recent past. The best day of all may be Sunday, which the National Weather Service is predicting will be mostly cloud-free in the Woonsocket area, with a high of 81 degrees — warmer than it’s been in a while. Things seem to be headed back downhill by Monday, with a forecast of partly cloudy skies, and Tuesday, with a 30 percent chance of showers.
But what about the rest of the summer? Will the whole kit-and-kaboodle be a weather wipeout?
Steeped as they are in the traditions of science, meteorologists like Foley and Cadoret tend to resist going out on the limb of long-range forecasting. They leave that to “The Old Farmer’s Almanac.” But Foley sounds optimistic — or at least he sounds like he wants to be.
“We’re looking for this pattern to break down,” he says. “The hope is we would have a typical summer.”
Cadoret says weather is like an endless battle of opposing forces trying to cancel each other out so the world can be “normal” — a word that has virtually no meaning in the daily observation of climatic conditions. “It’s almost never normal,” he says. But in the long run, Cadoret says one would expect this season’s cooler, damper conditions to give way to a prolonged spell of more temperate, drier weather.
It’s just a question of when.
“I would venture to say we’re in for a very late summer and possibly a very warm, early fall,” Cadoret says. “The atmosphere is always trying to even things up.”
And what about “The Old Farmer’s Almanac”? Ominously, the venerable folk Bible of climatology predicts conditions ranging from unsettled to showery for much of the month.
You can bet against the Almanac, but Jaswell wouldn’t. Jaswell says he gets his weather information from a variety of sources, including a private company that sends him daily e-mails. “The most accurate so far has been the Farmer’s Almanac,” he says.