Summer Season is here, but Summer is not.

The merry month of May is in the books and statistically is was pretty darn 'normal'. Overnight lows averaged almost dead 'normal' and the average daily high was about a degree above 'normal'. Rainfall came in well under normal but May is a month with a wide range of variance so it was really pretty typical. The Memorial Day Weekend was pretty nice with mid eighties on Saturday and Sunday and a mild 76° on Monday. June is starting off cloudy and damp and that is typical as well. For most of America, June kicks off the summer season. Here on the west side of the Cascade mountains, June remains firmly in the grasp of spring and her volatile moods.

Temperatures were literally a roller coaster ride on the chart. On May 4th we had a nice sunny 83.1° for the high and it was followed by a chilly 59.5° on Cinco de Mayo. So went the whole month.

The only hot day was the 22nd when my thermometer topped at at exactly 90° the only reading to breech the nineties all month. I had eight days with a reading in the eighties or better and ten days that failed to reach 60°. The warmest overnight low came on the 4th with a summerish 56.5° and the coolest temperature came the morning of the 1st when it was a nippy 37.9°. That was one of four mornings that dipped into the thirties overnight. Such is the fickle nature of spring time in the Northwest. The chilliest daytime high was a cool 52° on the 13th.

As for the rainfall it shows up as below average but really May is often beset with light thunderstorms and scattered showers. My rainfall was light but other ares very near me probably recorded above average rainfall. I had nary a day above 1/4 inch of rain and just 8 days with precipitation. That said there were a couple of days where the region had strong thunderstorms including one that triggered an alert from the "Emergency Broadcast Network". That alert was for the northern part of Clark County where serious lightning strikes, flash flooding, and golf ball size hail were coming down. I got light showers during that event. Another amazing light show went on for nearly two hours to my south, but again the rain from that one missed me. So 1.24 inches was my bucket total for May well under my 3.25 average. The wettest day was the 16th with 0.24 inches.

June will likely be a roller coaster for the first half before we see a summer pattern develop. Such it is in late spring. May and June tend to be unpredictable. But the next sic weeks will deliver long, long, long daylight as we move into that period where we have 18 hours of light, dawn to dusk. Cloudy or not, that is good stuff :)