From May into June

The critical rains of May turned out to be somewhat of a mixed bag. The graph below shows precipitation at Deer Park for the current May (green line), May of 2025 (purple line), and an average May (brown line).  May 2026 featured two long dry spells, but with good rains in the middle and and of the month.  But the total was half an inch below normal.  Compare that to last year which also had two long dry spells and ended with nearly the exact same total.  The biggest difference is that last year was dry during the last half of the month.

Looking at the entire region, the story was much the same.  Except for a couple of isolated locations, the entire state (actually nearly all of the Northwest) was well below normal for its rainfall in May.

So what can we expect for June weather?  The climate prediction center updated their outlook, but it’s still not an encouraging prediction.  Drier and warmer than normal for the Northwest.

All of the climate computer models back this idea.

In the meantime, we do have a few chances of rain over the next 10 days.  Nothing particularly heavy, but at least we’re not looking at a hot, dry spell. Here’s the forecast for Newport, WA.  The green bars show predicted 6 hourly rainfall and the green line shows the possible accumulation of all the events.

And here’s the same graph, but for Spokane.