Ahhhh, summer.

Now that spring is just a memory, was it as bad as it felt?

Yes.

This spring was wicked cold, wicked wet. The National Weather Service has the data.

May especially was abnormally cold and wet. This after a winter that wouldn’t go away.

National Weather Service precipitation statistics from Gray show this spring was wetter than the average. From March 1 through May 31, 13.86 inches fell, compared to the norm of 12.45 inches.

“But May was way over normal,” said NWS meteorologist Andy Pohl. In May, we got hammered with 6.04 inches of rain. The norm is 3.9 inches.

May’s rainfall wasn’t a record; the record belongs to 2006, when 8.54 inches fell in May. But this year’s 6.04 inches was nearly three times as much as last year, when only 2.02 inches fell.

Add to the rain the cold and lack of sun. The average high temperature in May was 3.6 degrees below average, a significant difference, Pohl said.

June has been decent so far — but overall, spring was hard to take, Pohl said.

“What happened was in the first part of the winter we didn’t have a lot of snow,” Pohl said. “Most fell in February through the middle of April. Then we rolled into May, which was wet.

“We don’t keep track of cloud cover, but we didn’t have a whole lot of sun,” he said. “It felt miserable.”

FILE PHOTO, WEB ONLY
Melissa Tirado walks in the rain on College Street in Lewiston on May 8.