May Was The Nation's Wettest Month On Record, June Starts Wet, Too

A Texas city inundated by floods this May.
Photo from Getty images.  

Taken as a whole, the United States had its wettest month on record during May, according to NOAA's climate monitoring center. 

This was despite continued drought on the West Coast and relatiely dry weather on most of the East Coast.

The deluges in Texas and Oklahoma that brought record flooding more than made up for the relative dryness on the coasts.

If you looked at the precipitation totals for most of the reporting stations across the United States and averaged it out, you'd get a precipitation total for the contiguous United States (excluding Hawaii and Alaska) of 4.36 inches.

That's 1.45 inches more than normal, which doesn't sound like a lot, but if you're talking about the average across the entire Lower 48, that's a huge departure from normal.

Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas had their wettest May on record. A total of 15 states in the middle of the country had precipitation far, far above normal.

These downpours were accompanied by severe weather. There were more than 400 preliminary tornado reports in May, 2015, the most since April 2011. The May, 2015 tornado activity ended a relative tornado drought in the nation that began in 2012.

Quite a bit of warmth embraced the nation, too.  Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Alaska had their warmest May on record.

The downpours have continued into June.

As of this morning, flood watches were up for very large sections of the central Rockies, and in another big area stretching from Nebraska into Wisconsin.

Meteorologists are particularly concerned about Colorado what with the remants of Hurricane Blanca, record high moisture levels in the atmosphere there and conditions that are primed to form intense thunderstorms.

 Here's what National Weather Service meteorologist Steve Hodanish wrote in today's forecast discussion from Pueblo, Colorado:

".....based on our antecedent conditions and computer guidance/simulations, things have the potential to get very ugly later today and tonight. We are dealing in uncharted meteorological territory with this event."

Scientists who study global warming have long said there would be more extreme droughts and floods as the world gets hotter.

The weather pattern this spring is consistent with that. The Texas deluges ended a brutal four year drought there, a really big case of "weather whiplash."

Flash flooding in Richmond, Vermont this week
 threatend to sweep this car away.
Photo by Demeny Politt. 

Here where I live in Vermont, flash flooding caused quite a bit of localized damage this week, especially in the towns of Richmond and Bolton.

Flash floods in Vermont have become a "new normal." There have always been floods in the Green Mountain State, as heavy rains send water rushing down steep mountain slopes.

Now, however, the floods have become almost a yearly event. Spring and summer downpours seem to have gotten more intense.

Damaging floods have hit parts of the state every year since 1995 except 2001. (Though in 2014, flooding was not particularly extreme.)

Some of these floods have been unusually long lasting, instead of the usual quick hit for a few days and then it's over. In the spring of 2011, repeated floods sent Lake Champlain to its highest level on record, and later that summer, Hurricane Irene caused the worst Vermont floods since 1927.

In the summer of 2013, flash flooding hit different parts of the state almost daily over a four week period in June and early July.

Of course, it remains to be seen if severe floods will continue through the summer in parts of the nation. But the summer is not off to a good start, in terms of flooding and severe weather.