It's not just you. It has been raining a lot over the past month. And by a lot, we mean the sky has been frantically dumping water like a couple of sailors trying to scoop water out of their boat with buckets before it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal organization based in the United States, reports that this recent May of 2015 was the "wettest month on record" for the contiguous United States; those are the 48 states that are touching each other, excluding Alaska and Hawaii, in case you were unaware.
This is a pretty big record breaker because the NOAA has been keeping track of rainfall for 121 years (since 1895). The total precipitation for May 2015 was 4.36 inches, which the NOAA notes is 1.35 inches above what is considered average.
As noted by John Crouch, a climate scientist for the NOAA, those numbers are somewhere in the ballpark of 200 trillion gallons of water over the course of the entire month of May (AP).
Texas had some of the wettest of the wet experiences in the month of May, while the Western and Eastern United States were typically pretty dry for the most part.
The Southern central United States received most of the rainfall and includes states like Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas. The rainfall was much needed however, considering that these states had been in somewhat of a water shortage for some time.
This rainy summer season continues through to the month of June for many parts of the United States, but no records have been broken this month just yet.
Source: NOAA via NYTimes
Earth & The Environment
JUN 08, 2015