A Cool and Wet Month

By Russell Russ

June was a wet and relatively cool month. May was record-setting for warmth and much drier than normal. The two months were on opposite sides of the spectrum. In May we were looking for some rain, any rain, and in June for even a couple of days in a row with no rain. This see-sawing seems to be the way the weather has been going recently.

June began much cooler than normal, downright chilly you could say, then it warmed up to near normal for the remainder of the month. Sunny days were hard to come by, though, and rainfall was much higher than normal. If there is a good month/bad month weather pattern, which I doubt, then July will be sunny and pleasant.

June’s low temperature of 39 degrees was observed on June 7 and the high of 83 degrees was observed on June 13 and 24. With an average monthly temperature of 62.3 degrees it was one degree cooler than average and two degrees cooler than last June. As cool as it might have seemed there were no temperature records set this month. Interestingly, June’s average temperature was only 0.5 degree warmer than May’s average temperature. Typically June is 8.6 degrees warmer than May. Of course, this past May was far and away the warmest May on record.

The total precipitation recorded for the month was 9.20 inches, 4.33 inches above normal. There were three thunderstorms observed this month, all occurred on June 23. It was the fifth wettest June over the last 84 years. The top six wettest Junes over the last 84 years: 2013 with 13.38 inches, 1986 with 10.41, 2009 with 9.53, 1972 with 9.22, 2015 with 9.20 and 1937 with 8.73.

For the first half of 2015, January through June, our total precipitation amount was 23.41 inches. Through May our precipitation deficit for the year was 6.55 inches. Through June the deficit was 2.22 inches so we indeed made up some ground in the rain department.

Weather observations are recorded by the Great Mountain Forest at Norfolk’s National Weather Service Cooperative Weather Observer Station, Norfolk 2 SW.