(SOUTHERN COLORADO) — The months of May and June are still hot topics when it comes to rainfall because of how unusually wet they were. One area of statistics that is helpful for analyzing how ‘normal’ certain aspects are, is the departure from normal.

Every day, week, month, or even year there is a ‘normal’ that has been established through climatological data. This can be ‘the normal’ for variables such as daily temperature, yearly high temperature, rainfall for the year, rainfall for a specific day – and so on.

Above, we see that a good majority of our viewing area reported well-above-normal precipitation totals for the months of May and June combined. For example, Colorado Springs reported more than 10 inches of precipitation above normal for those two months and Lamar reported almost 7 inches above normal.

The departure from normal can be a positive or negative value too.

The graph of the Southwest U.S, above, highlights areas that received well-above-average two-month totals and well-below-average two-month totals. The Denver/Colorado Springs area is doing particularly well with precipitation, whereas the desert southwest is struggling just a bit.

Another resource that is available to us is a national network of weather reporting called ‘CoCoRaHS.’ Within this network, everybody, no matter who you are, is able to report a number of weather variables including rainfall and snowfall.

Some examples, (below), highlight a few different CoCoRaHS members from around the viewing area. These people also reported on the two-month precipitation totals for May and June from their very own backyard.

The ability to access these hyper-local weather reports is extremely valuable.

More information about CoCoRaHs data available can be found through the link above.