We have had storm after storm after storm come through our area. I think the bulk of tornado alley has shared in this. But we've had so much rain we're on the cusp of setting a new record for the most rain in a month, ever. Just need about 2" of rain to do so and we have heavy rain predicted for tonight and all day Tuesday.

I love storms, but I don't love flooding and even I am ready for a break.

We've hit another round of storms here, was thundering earlier actually. Friday and the first half of Saturday was lovely, got as much yard work done as I could, overnight it poured probably half an inch(I usually empty our ducks' water dish at night because of mosquitoes, and there was still water in it this morning. Next door neighbor said end of next week it's going to be storming again. Hope it lets up soon, I have gardening to attend to!

We have had storm after storm after storm come through our area. I think the bulk of tornado alley has shared in this. But we've had so much rain we're on the cusp of setting a new record for the most rain in a month, ever. Just need about 2" of rain to do so and we have heavy rain predicted for tonight and all day Tuesday.

I love storms, but I don't love flooding and even I am ready for a break.

Quite so. I believe down here we are the flip side of your problems at the moment. We are heading into water restrictions despite a desalination plant which many ridiculed back in 2009, when we had our last drought, & is now proving its worth. Much as I sympathise, hearing of heaps of tornados in Nebraska & Ohio, to the north of you, I could wish some of that water might come down here.

Dorothea MacKellar wrote: I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains.
Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts & flooding rains.
I love her far horizons, I love her jewelled sea.
Its beauty & its terror, the Wide Brown Land for me.

(Australia, Australia, the wide brown land for me)

This is part of a well quoted poem here which was set to music when I was a schoolgirl. Though it never came to anything, I sort of thought at the time this song in its entirety would have made a good national song, if not the National anthem. The whole poem says all too poignantly just what it is to live in Australia, & what sometimes others here forget.

Here in London I've been hoping for a summer as nice as last year, when the sun shone for several months, barely raining at all. This was the first time I can remember seeing browned off grass in the lawns in England!

With the last spring month about to end, there's still no real sign of a hot summer. We've had showers, cloudy weather, even quite cool in the mornings.

Watch this space!

Your London weather sounds similar to ours, Auntie. Almost all days this month have been cooler than average with some rain and clouds, though it looks like the heat (and accompanying mosquitoes) will make an appearance later this week.

fantasia, I've been following some of the severe storm coverage in the central US. Some frightening stuff. At the moment we're too far north to be in the hot zone for severe weather, but that will likely change very soon.

wagga, I think it would take me a while to get used to the 'wide brown land' mentioned in that poem. Things here are in the vibrant green of spring, which is nice to see after months of snow.

Yes there is a strong El Nino effect across the Pacific, I believe, & Stargazer, yes you might well find Australia a little hard to take. Nice to visit, perhaps, but maybe not always so comfortable to live here? This may be a much sharper drought than the one a decade ago, unfortunately. I hope not, & that it doesn't get as bad as the horrifying drought that afflicted Cape Town, at the southern tip of Africa only a year or so ago. I still wonder why it took so long for water restrictions to come into effect given that there is a sharply increased population around here & that this drought started in spring of 2017.

This, by the way, is the full poem. And it is all about weather.

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Thundering off and on here(Klamath county, in southern Oregon). Been having constant rain lately, with Friday and Saturday morning being the exception, supposed to storm tomorrow too, then heat up and cool down slightly and remain in the 70s for a few days.

Just returned from a vacation with the Mrs. earlier this week. More on that in a minute.
We have been receiving on, and off rain for the last few weeks. While it does green things up a bit we are hoping for a little less as the sump pump has been running almost constant once the frost broke over a month ago.
Back to happy returns. And I do mean returns as we almost did not.
Did you know that Yellowstone National Park has a howitzer? It is located in what is called on the maps" Avalanche Pass". It is used to trigger small avalanches in order to avoid bigger ones. We apparently missed one of these by a day as we noticed a lot of broken trees, and other debris next to the road the next morning
Note to all who may be interested in going there. Be sure to give yourself plenty of time to leave in daylight. In higher elevations it snows almost every day. Driving switchbacks, at night, in a snowstorm, is a call for much prayer. Which my wife did the whole way as we crawled, and sometimes slid our way along.
Snow covered mountains are a wonder to behold. At a distance .

Thanks, wagga, for the poem. It certainly does invoke a lot of imagery about what your country is like. (I would like to visit Australia someday, both for its scenery and astronomical sights).

Avalanche Pass, Puddleglum? That sounds a little ominous. I've only been to the western national parks in the spring or summer, though in northern ones like Olympic or Glacier that means there is still plenty of snow to be seen.

Meteorological summer began here June 1, and beginning tomorrow it's going to try living up to that, with high humidity and temperatures, and chances for severe storms.

The sky here has not been blue of late, but rather a pale, almost milky, white. Sunrises and sunsets have had spectacular shades of orange and red, and the stars are dimmer at night. This is due to forest fire smoke blowing down from northern Alberta, carried over 1000 miles (1600km) by the jet stream. It's even visible from space.

And my brother is not far away from that northern Alberta forest fire (about 30 kms). He is watching on a fire tower near High Level, but he was not the one to call this fire in, for it happened on his day off, otherwise he might have had the opportunity.

But here, thousands of kms east, we have had so much rain over the past month. Spring has been very late. Poor farmers: many of them are only starting to plant now, as the fields have been moisture saturated.

This is our first stretch of dry weather since I can't remember when. And the first period when we have had temps in the mid 20s for a few days in a row. It was only a week ago or so when we were still dropping down to near freezing at night.

I have planted our veggie and floral gardens over the past few weeks: with all the rain and now the sunshine, they are doing very well. We are on a bit of a higher point, so the rain has not flooded us out, as it has a few other places in Ontario.

We are even supposed to have a humidex reading on Sunday, blech. Starting to count the days until it begins to feel like Autumn.

Oh steady on, johobbit! It isn't even the summer solstice yet, let alone the Autumn equinox. I'm glad, though, your garden is flourishing, & that you have had better luck than we have been having of late.

It is said we may get rain, but they said that last week, when though it did rain for a day or three, in a "skittery" sort of way, it still did not do much to alleviate our tumbling water resources. It has been chilly when it is cloudy.

The sky here has not been blue of late, but rather a pale, almost milky, white. Sunrises and sunsets have had spectacular shades of orange and red, and the stars are dimmer at night. This is due to forest fire smoke blowing down from northern Alberta, carried over 1000 miles (1600km) by the jet stream. It's even visible from space.

Some of those spectacular orange & red sunrises & sunsets, I've been told, also happen when there has been volcanic activity recently. Two of them within days, Mount Agung in Bali three days ago, & currently Mount Sinabung on Sumatra, with a 7 km ash cloud, is still erupting as of today.

Mt. Sinabung? That sounds familiar, maybe when I was investigating/researching volcanic eruptions that caused serious weather issues, like the year without a summer. Or one of the documentaries about Mt. Saint Helens, who knows?

Anyway, weather has been hot here, though last night we had a spectacular thunderstorm. The beginning of it made it seem like it was going to be a duffer, there was like an hour or two delay between the onset and when things got serious. Constant thunder/lightning that terrified our dog, and pouring rain for at least a couple hours. Was right around my bedtime too when it hit, and was so hard to get to sleep, mainly because Scruffy kept wanting to be around me, and would either be on my bed with me or trying to find a place near/under it and it was kinda hot still in my room, so he was panting right next to me constantly from his exertions.

Rain is a normal part of life in Britain, but we've had a drier year so far. A wet week has surprised us! But really we know what summers are usually like. This poem was written a long time ago by an unknown author. It applies to Scotland and England,and probably everywhere else in the country too!

RAIN

It rained and it rained and rained and rained,
The average fall was well maintained.
And when the tracks were simply bogs,
It started raining cats and dogs.

After a drought of half an hour
We had a most refreshing shower,
And then the most curious thing of all,
A gentle rain began to fall.

Next day was also fairly dry
Except for the deluge from the sky,
Which wetted the party to the skin.
And after that the rain set in.

I chuckled at that poem, coracle. Some here might say it applies to our overly-wet weather this spring.

Some of those spectacular orange & red sunrises & sunsets, I've been told, also happen when there has been volcanic activity recently.

Very true! I especially remember the June 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which apparently ejected the most matter into the atmosphere since Krakatoa in 1883, giving vivid sunset colors. It also cooled the atmosphere around the world (here, the summer of 1992 was cooler than average, with no days reaching 90F/32C, which is unusual despite our reputation for cold weather).

Speaking of cool weather, areas in northern Minnesota reported temperatures around 25F/-4C yesterday, and we're almost to the solstice.

Today was a perfect June day - crystal clear blue skies, no humidity (the dewpoint was only 2C), and a temperature around 70F/21C. Wonderful!

Lastly, I found this report about noctilucent clouds being sighted far outside their usual range (which is the high latitudes). These electric-blue clouds are extremely high in the atmosphere and usually visible only closer to the poles, but of late they've been sighted much farther south, including one sighting from downtown Minneapolis (latitude 45N). I'd like to see these - something I never anticipated seeing without traveling some distance.

Mt. Sinabung? That sounds familiar, maybe when I was investigating/researching volcanic eruptions that caused serious weather issues, like the year without a summer. Or one of the documentaries about Mt. Saint Helens, who knows?

I might have put this Indonesian volcano, if not Sumatra, on the A-Z of Geography thread. There is the famed "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific Ocean, stretching from above the Kamchatka Peninsula, right across to Alaska, where there was a huge earthquake in 1960 in Anchorage, then down the coastlines of both North America & South America, to Valdivia in Chile or further south. Then across the Pacific to another major fault in the Earth's crust near New Zealand, then upwards where it meets other faults going through Indonesia & up past the Philippines to Japan & beyond. The North American Year without a Summer was in 1816 or thereabouts, & was caused by the eruption of Mt Tambora, again in Indonesia. Believe it or not, this volcanic eruption thus brought my mother's ancestors to Australia, to the fledgeling city of Hobart in Tasmania.

We've had a little rain, so far, but it didn't last. Thank you for the poem, Coracle . Twenty two years ago we went to UK. I left without my nice warm winter jacket, was told by my Scottish immigrant husband it was Midsummer in UK so I wouldn't need it. Which is why I found UK's summer that year horribly freezingly cold, no doubt.