Amarillo Breaking Precipitation Records? The Answer's Surprising

Ok, I know the rain and talking about it has pretty much become an annoyance at this point, but we haven't seen THIS kind of rain for quite awhile.

Lakes are appearing where they don't actually exist, roads are being closed due to high water that is truly impassible, and we're constantly in flood warnings.

It got me wondering about whether or not we're starting to approach record precipitation levels in Amarillo. It feels like it's been raining for a month straight without a break, truthfully it reminds me a lot of when I visited Florida. Without fail, it would be a torrential downpour for about 20-30 minutes, then just clear out and not come back.

Now, it hasn't followed that exact pattern here, but it's been relatively close. We seem to be relatively good throughout the day, then the rain has trickled its way in around 5 pm or so. By 7-8 pm, we're getting pummeled for 30 minutes or so, then off to the next place.

When it's rained, it's dumped. We seem to get anywhere from 1-2 inches of rain when it starts. I mean, we have to be reaching record levels of precipitation for months and the year right?

This May, we received a stunning 7.36 inches of rain. The record for monthly rainfall here? You have to go all the way back to June 1965 when we received 10.7 inches of rain. Ok, so we didn't touch that record. It's got to be the most rain we've received in may though, right?

Nope, that number is 9.81 inches of rain in May of 1951. So even with all the rain we've gotten, we didn't touch a monthly record in any capacity. It's still a ton of precipitation.

The most precipitation Amarillo has ever seen in a year was back in 1960 where we got 36.7 inches. That's snow and rain combined. We are only about 1/3 of the way there as we're sitting around 12 inches of precipitation for the year.

We could however go over our average yearly precipitation if this keeps up. We average just short of 20 inches of precipitation per year, so only around 7 more inches to go, and we still have half the year to go.

Will we reach our average precipitation totals for the year? Well I guess we all have to just wait and find out.

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