I must admit that covering storms nearly every afternoon and night has felt a little strange. The ongoing drought has been troubling and tiresome for many, but it's nice to see it raining again on a steady basis (even though getting back to "normal" will take substantially more rain)
The month of May is traditionally one of the wetter months of the year and sometimes it comes with hail and wind. We've seen more than our fair share over the past several weeks. This map highlights the observed rainfall. Probably not surprising that heaviest rainfall ended up in eastern Kansas, but there were some nice amounts of rain from west central Kansas up into areas just west of Hays. Dodge City and a sizeable amount of central Kansas continue to be on the lower end of the rainfall. We did get some last minute, heavy rainfall in northwest Kansas on the night of May 30th - that' won't be reflected in this map.
My colleague, Haylen Wilhite, did some tornado research to find that our tornado count (through the end of May) now stands as the highest since 2019. Most recent years have been very quiet with respect to tornadoes, but we've had some very active weeks. Strongest tornadoes in Kansas this year have had an EF-3 rating. We go into June well ABOVE average on tornadoes across the United States (notice in the chart below that the red line - which is current tornado count is tracking above the black line - average tornadoes). In fact, this is one of the busiest years in the last 10+ years, but still comes us well shy of 2011 which was a record year.
June outlook:
The month could start off on a slightly wetter than average note (that is reflected in the map below from Texas to the Upper Midwest), but for the wheat harvest that is about to get underway, there's plenty of dry stretches ahead too. We expect the "night-after-night" storm setup to end around June 5 and then it will be mainly dry for almost a week.
Temperatures are not going to be all that bad for early June - mostly highs in the 80s, which will average out to near or slightly warmer than the average.
There are some signals of a shift toward rain/storms again as we move into week 2. This would be scattered storms potentially forming off the High Plains of Colorado/western Kansas and then drifting on to the east. I am NOT confident that it will be significant rainfall on a large scale. That's reflected in the map below. Note the area of western Kansas and Oklahoma/Texas that are not shaded in brown - that's where we may end up with some better rainfall in week 2. It's an area where drought has been pretty rough, and there should be some nice rains in that area.
No big heat wave in the second week of June! If anything, our temperatures may skew toward the cooler side, which would more than likely yield highs in the low to mid 80s and some lows in the 50s.
Mid-late June: Most models shift toward warmer/hotter weather later in the month. Is this a stretch of 100s for Kansas? Probably not because the heat ridge will likely setup in the desert Southwest and Kansas would be on the eastern edge of it all. However, we may have several days with highs getting into the 90s. And I'm not totally convinced we will have widespread rains happening in the 3rd week of the month, but northern Kansas could be on the receiving end of some moisture.
The summer solstice this year is June 20th - mid-afternoon. Average highs will jump to the low 90s by the end of the month. June can be one of the wetter months of the year (assuming the heat dome doesn't anchor over Kansas). Welcome meteorological summer!
Have a great day!
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