Northern Vermont Actually Slightly Dry This Month As We Keep Complaining About Wet Weather

After getting plenty of rain in May, these peonies in
my St. Albans, Vermont gardens seemed to be 
enjoying the June sunshine this morning. 

We in Vermont have pretty much spent the entire spring and the first part of June complaining about the wet weather.  

It has been wet, of course.  The National Centers for Environmental Information says Vermont had its second wettest May on record, as one example.

But a funny thing happened as we got into June. 

Believe it or not,  northern Vermont has been a bit on the dry side so far this month, and that trend looks like it will continue for perhaps up the next six or seven days at least. Maybe more. 

Don't worry. Northern Vermont is definitely not going into drought. The ground is still pretty damp and river flows are certainly healthy. 

Plus, it's still raining in northern Vermont, just not as hard as it did in April and May. In fact, I heard a brief downpour on my roof in St. Albans in the hours before dawn today. Burlington picked up a tiny bit of rain after midnight, too. 

Through yesterday, Burlington has has 0.62 inches of rain so far this month, which is a little less than half of what would normally have fallen so far in June.  

Montpelier has only had about a half inch of rain so far in June, which is a full inch on the light side for this point in the month.  St. Johnsbury has also had less rain than average for June so far.

Southern Vermont still continues to slog through wet weather, though. Parts of southeast Vermont even suffered some flash flood damage last Friday. 

Even places near and south of Route 4 that had no flooding have been pretty wet in June. Bennington has had 2.44 inches of rain so far this month, agains an average of 1.39 inches through June 11. 

Union Village Dam in Thetford, a little north of White River Junction, has had 3.11 inches so far in June, against an average of about an inch and half. (I'm not counting the 1.75 inches of rain listed on June 1 in Thetford, as that rain actually fell on May 31. The measurement was just taken on June 1 when somebody checked the rain gauge there).

OUTLOOK

The trend toward a wetter south will continue this weekend, to an extent.

Meteorologists have backed off on how much rain Vermont will see this weekend. Still, the south looks like it will be a little wetter than the north. The bottom half of Vermont probably will get a quarter to a half inch of rain through Sunday, while the top half is scheduled to see less than a quarter inch.

All this doesn't tell us how the month will ultimately end up. Rainfall is incredibly variable in the summer, since most of it comes from hit or miss showers and thunderstorms. 

Also, things could even out so that the south might get drier and the north could get wetter. Who knows?

After this weekend, the next shot of rain come Wednesday. Early guesses are that next week's rains will focus a little more on the north than the south, but of course, we can't be sure about that yet.  

Long range forecasts going to about the end of the month slightly lean toward a somewhat wetter than average second half of June in Vermont. But as we all know, we need to take weather forecasts more than five days out or so with a Mount Mansfield-sized grain of salt.