Ticker for May 20, 2026

                
MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ...
May 20, 2026       May 20, 2026       May 20, 2026       May 20, 2026


Good day, sir!




Hey, before we get started (okay, shortly after we get started), did anybody
else notice it was 20-30 degrees warmer on Christmas Day than it was yesterday
afternoon?





In fact, or strong opinion, yesterday would have been much better Christmas
weather than what we actually had. I probably would have gotten better presents,
too...come on, fam, stop with the hair brushes. It ain't happening.

What we're talking about now, though, is the amount of rain we're gonna get over
the next week or so. Listen, do you smell that? It's the sound of disappointment
we've felt over the last few weeks as May has been so underwhelming. Except for
the lack of tornadoes. With the rain, however, blech!







That's a far cry (wahhhhhh...now imagine that far away) from where we should be
at during May with only a 11 days left in the month. The normal statewide avg.
is 4.93 inches, and we're sitting at 1.33 inches for the month thus far. That's
why we REALLY need this forecast rainfall to come through so we can get a bit
closer to this map.



It's not that I'm pesmmi...pessimmi...doubtful it can happen, but once again, it
just doesn't rain a lot during droughts. However, to every drought, there is an
end. Sometimes it's a thunderbolt, like May 2015, and sometimes it's the death
of a thousand cuts. Or million raindrops. Maybe billions. And there's always
next week.



We've already beat 1988's 1.23 inches to surpass the driest May on record, but
we're over a ruler away from 2015's record statewide total of 14.42 inches.
Somewhere in the middle would be nice, no?

Gary McManus
State Climatologist
Oklahoma Mesonet
Oklahoma Climate Survey
gmcmanus@ou.edu