Looking Back at a Warm and Wet Spring Season (Credit: NOAA Center for Environmental Center-Climate)

Discussion: It’s a week into the official start of summer and NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information has released the State of Climate summary for Spring 2017. So how did May stack up against the rest of the spring? This May, the average temperature across the contiguous United States was 60.4° F which was only 0.4° F above average. May’s average temperature ranked near the middle of the 123-year period that the record has been kept.  Precipitation across the country for the month of May was 3.31 inches, 0.40 inches above the average.
 
For the entire spring (March-May) in the contiguous United States, the average temperature was 53.5° F.  Which was 2.6°F above average. The warmth at the beginning of the spring season helped bump the temperature above average.  This past spring was the eighth warmest spring on record. Across the Rockies, Southeast, Southern Plains, and Midwest nineteen states saw spring temperatures that were much above average. Precipitation for the entire season (March-May) was 9.39 inches making it the 11th wettest spring on record. To learn more about other regional climate stories from around the world, please click here.

 © 2017 Meteorologist Shannon Scully