By Russell Russ

Like last May, this May was far from lovely. Two duds in a row. Prior to that, the previous two were quite nice. This May was cool, cloudy and wet for much of the time. We did not receive a lot of rain, but there were many days with showers and drizzle—and clouds. There was a four-day period from May 17-20 with warm, even hot, summer-like weather when temperatures hit the mid 80’s and even topped 90 degrees on one day. After that it was back to cool and damp conditions to close out the month. It was a cool and wet Memorial Day Weekend, but fortunately Memorial Day afternoon turned out fairly nice. It is always disappointing when rain, or the threat of it, cancels the school marching bands from participating in Norfolk’s Memorial Day parade. May’s low temperature of 32 degrees was observed on May 3. The month’s high of 90 degrees was observed on May 19, which was a new record high temperature for that date, surpassing the old record of 87 from 1962. A high of 86 on May 17 just missed the 2017 record of 87 degrees for that date. With an average monthly mean temperature of 54.9 degrees, it was exactly normal for temperature. Being exactly normal does not happen often. It sure felt cooler than normal during the month. Norfolk’s warmest May occurred in 2015 with a temperature of 61.8 degrees. The coldest was in 1967 with 46.8. It was a subpar weather month. Let us hope that June does a better job.

The total precipitation recorded for the month was 2.92 inches, 1.42 inches below normal. Below normal, but not high ranking for low rainfall. It was surprising to see a below normal rainfall total after it felt like such a wet month. If it is going to be lousy weather and rainy, it might as well rain enough to be beneficial. There were no thunderstorms observed at the weather station this month, which is a little unusual for May. Norfolk’s wettest May was in 1984 with 12.34 inches, the driest was in 1980 with 1.31 inches.

There was only a trace of snowfall in May this year. Very light snow showers were observed during the morning of May 3. This was technically 0.4 inches below normal, but it is common to see very little or no snowfall in May. We usually get at least a couple of days in May with snow flurries or even a light dusting. Norfolk’s last measurable snowfall of the winter season was 1.4 inches that fell during two rounds of snow showers on the morning of April 7. A snow squall during the late morning was brief, but very heavy. Norfolk’s good old-fashioned winter with cold and snow was basically a December through February winter. The snowfall essentially ceased after February. The snowiest May, and the biggest reason May’s monthly average snowfall amount is 0.4 inches instead of closer to zero, was in May 1977 with 20.0 inches. This 1977 snow-fall is still the record for both Norfolk and the State of Connecticut for the month of May. Weather observations are recorded by the Great Mountain Forest at Norfolk’s National Weather Service Cooperative Weather Ob-server Station, Norfolk 2SW.