Vermont May: Dry Again; First Half Well Behaved, Second Half, Not So Much

May was a dry month, but at least there was enough rain,
and some irrigation, to keep the seasonal flowers blooming

 We've closed the book on May's weather in Vermont, and we endured another dry month.

Except in southeastern Vermont, where precipitation was pretty close to normal, rainfall ran two inches or so on the light side. 

So, we keep dealing with what could be some dangerously dry conditions heading into the summer. Just since January 1, we're more than 3.5 inches on the dry side for the year in northwestern Vermont.  

To give a sense of how dry it is, I dug down more than a foot to plant a sapling near my house in St. Albans, Vermont the other day. It was pretty much dust at least a foot down into the ground. 

I expect some wells to go dry in Vermont this summer. 

Temperatures were almost uniformly about half a degree above normal this month, which basically means pretty close to average.

Remember, though, this is the "new normal." Starting in May, the "normal" temperature for any give month is the average from all the months from 1990 to 2020. Due to climate change, normal ain't what it used to be. It's higher. 

For instance, in this past month, the average temperature in Burlington was 58.9 degrees. Under the "new" normal, that works out to 0.5 degrees warmer than the new average.

Had we been operating under the "old" normal, this May would have been 2.6 degrees warmer than average, which was the mean for 1980-2010 under the old way of calculating. 

The first half of May, 2021 was pretty well behaved. Temperatures during that period never strayed too far from average, and we never came close to any records. We even had the only soaking rain of the month, on May 4-5, when most of us got close to an inch of precipitation. 

The second half of the month definitely went more rogue. Record-heat enveloped Vermont on May 2021, with Burlington peaking at 92 degrees on the 20th, and most other valley locations getting to, or at least close to 90 degrees. 

That was followed by a round of severe storms on May 26, which caused quite a lot of tree and power line damage, especially in a broad path from Addison County into the Northeast Kingdom.

Then, last weekend, late season snows hit the upper elevations of the southern Green Mountains. 

It looks like heading into June, we have new extremes in the offing. After some pretty seasonable weather and a welcome threat of showers on Thursday, it looks like another early season heat wave is building. It looks like a long one, with 90 degree temperatures starting to pop up by Sunday in Vermont and continuing well into next week. 

If  you haven't already, now is a good time to drag your air conditioner out of storage and get it ready for use.

Time will tell if this expected heat wave is a harbinger of another hot summer. Last summer in Burlington, Vermont was the hottest on record, with a mean temperature of 72.3 degrees for the period from June 1 through August 31. 

Hot summers have become a bit of a trend. In Burlington four of the five hottest summers have happened since 2005. Three of those top five hot summers have been since 2016. 

Very cool summers might be a thing of the past. The last time Burlington had a summer that made the top 10 coolest list was way back in 1968.