May wrap up & your June outlook

The month of May is in the books and it's the 2nd warmest for Wichita. A month that was chucked full of above normal highs. Only 1 day in May had a cooler than normal high. What is going on?

• The average high temperature was 87° for Wichita and 87° for Dodge City. And normal highs are mainly in the 70s for May. Just crazy.

Rainfall for May:

The month was pretty normal for most of the state. Some had more than others, but that's normal. What isn't normal is seeing Goodland with more rain than most of central and eastern Kansas.  Goodland finishes the month more than 3" above average. The map below shows how much rain fell in May across Kansas. Use the color bars at the right for a legend.

May Rainfall

If you want to see the latest drought map, check yesterdays blog. I have a comparison from early May to the latest map.

June Outlook:

Alright, so what's going to happen in June? Well, it's going to be warmer than normal (surprise surprise) and when it comes to rainfall, I don't see us getting above normal rains. The best we can hope for is normal, which would still mean about 2.50"-4.50". It's difficult to say on rainfall sometimes because when you are dealing with isolated thunderstorms, amounts can vary significantly (as we saw this week around Hill City) But because we continue to see a July/August kind of weather pattern, it's going to be a struggle getting the kind of rains that most of us would like to have. I don't know that we'll have a record setting summer, but it's going to be a LONG one for sure.