Wettest 12 Month Period On Record For The United States

It seems like for the past year, almost all I've written about in this blog thingy is flooding somewhere in the nation. Just yesterday I mentioned flooding, and it's still ongoing in the South.

If it seemed wet across the nation to me in the past year, I was on to something.

According to a factoid I came across in the Category 6 weather blog, the 12 months ending on April 30 were the wettest 12 month period on record in the United States as a whole.

As Bob Henson wrote in the blog post:

"Averaged across the contiguous U.S., the total of 36.20 inches made the period from May 2018 to April 2019 the first year-long span ever to top 36 inches. The old record for any 12-month period was 35.78 inches from April, 2015 to March, 2016."

Henson got his data from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.

Of course, the nation is big an the weather is highly variable from place to place and month to month and even day to day.

However, the United States has been trending wetter. Yearly average rainfall in the United States has increased by about two inches over the past century. That makes sense with climate change. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water, which can be unleashed in the form of heavier precipitation.

Here in Vermont, things seem to be trending wetter, too. Records in Burlington go all the way back to the 1880s.  The six wettest years have all occurred since 1973. Only one of the Top 10 driest years have occurred in the past 50 years or so.

The wet nation is resulting in a lot of flooding, but is minimizing droughts, at least for now. Nearly 90 percent of the nation is currently free of drought or abnormally dry conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

That doesn't necessarily mean the nation will avoid drought. With or without climate change, there can be wild swings from wet to dry to wet again. As you can see by the chart in this post, the trend line for the nation has been generally wetter, but with big changes year to year. Some periods are very dry, some very wet. You never know.

I guess it's just human nature that we complain about too much or too little water.