Rain has been the theme of the week.
Many of us may be getting tired of the frequent heavy storms, but they’ve brought our rainfall totals much closer to normal for the month of August.
Severe weather events were a big theme early in August across the eastern plains.
Massive baseball-sized and larger hailstones were recorded on August 9th along with several tornado warnings.
But these storms were widely scattered. So while intense… they didn’t provide widespread heavy rain to the Front Range.
As of Thursday morning, Colorado Springs’ airport had seen about 2.4" of rain since August began.
Pueblo’s airport has seen almost the same amount.
This is a half inch above average in Pueblo and about three-tenths below average in the Springs.
But that’s not particularly notable.
Out of all of that rain: almost all of it has fallen in the last week!
Only about a tenth of an inch of rain fell in Colorado Springs in the -entire- rest of August.
Pueblo picked up a third of an inch on the 9th during the severe weather event across the area that day.
But that’s it.
The rest has also all fallen in the last several days,
meaning this buzzer-beater monsoon pattern is largely to thank for pulling us back from building drought concerns.
Normally August is Pueblo’s wettest month and Colorado Springs’ second wettest month of the year.
There’s a dramatic drop in September in both cities.
If you’re curious about how typical this is…
It’s not.
In the last 10 years, there’s been no other instance where we ended up with average rainfall after being almost entirely dry the rest of the month.
But it is typical for us to get most of our rain in August from a few very wet days. It's actually rather "typical" for July and August to be "atypical". The reason is that with summer monsoon moisture, storms are generally scattered on any given day. We record rainfall officially at the Colorado Springs and Pueblo airports.
On various days in August, heavy storms hit northern or western parts of both cities, but the rain missed the airport. And then, on a couple of days, a heavy storm moved directly over the airport resulting in very high single day rain totals.
But the general pattern this August still does hold - a bit of activity early in the month, bone dry through much of the rest of the month, and a deluge of moisture to close it off.
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