Here in extreme south-central Love County, we are at 25.5" (that includes today's rain) at least, and it could be higher because I cannot remember if I added one amount from one day, so it might be about a inch higher than that. Down south of Thackerville, some people have had a couple more inches than we've had, but our mesonet station probably has had about 3" less. Obviously there is extreme flooding in the River bottom lands adjacent to the Red River, where the river this morning was still 10.4 feet above flood stage. Our county courthouse (the oldest courthouse in OK still in use) flooded on the day we got over 6" in one day on top of already heavily-saturated soil), homes and businesses in town and some scattered around the lower-lying parts of the county have had some flood damage. Gravel driveways have washed out and all but disappeared out here in the rural areas, and some roads (paved and unpaved) have washed out and are damaged....or are completely gone. I could go on, but you get the idea. We also have had recurring phone, cell phone and internet issues ever since the day we got the 6+" of rain, and every time I think they have everything fixed, everything goes out again.

Oddly, for Love County, this probably isn't its rainiest May ever, as hard as that is to believe. I haven't looked it up, but I think May of 1990 was even worse, and that also was a year with flooding----even more flooding than we have this year.

We definitely have suffered greatly from too much rainfall in May, but it is even worse that all this rain fell on top of heavily saturated soil. I believe we have had above-average rainfall in all but 1 month, and we already are at our annual average rainfall for the year, with 7+ months left to go.

Without raised beds, I'd had no garden left at all. I feel like our yard is hopelessly ruined....because every step you take, you leave been muddy footprints in the soil as the mud tries to suck the shoes or boots off your feet. If you use a mower or wheelbarrow, it leaves ruts. I an sure things eventually will get better and the yard will recover, but right now it is like living in the middle of a shallow pond, and it has been that way almost every day this month. By the time the water starts to soak in, another inch or two of rain falls. The chickens are sick of the mud and stand only on the sidewalk, gravel driveway or porch as much as possible. They act like they are allergic to grass, but they're just tired of having wet feet. Aren't we all?

Don't get me wrong. We needed good, heavy rainfall in vast quantities to fill up the lakes, ponds, creeks and rivers, and also to soak in deeply and recharge the aquifers. I understand that. We stay dry so often that we just have to accept the inevitable occasional floods that end our multi-year droughts. I just wish so much of the rain this year didn't have to fall in the month of May. It is going to take our county and its cities and its citizens months and lots of $$$$ to repair all the damage. Every night I put the leash on Jersey and take her for a walk and we say hello to our driveway, which is all in the road, running alongside the bar ditch, for a few hundred feet. The driveway area itself? It is mud and running water....like a drainage ravine. No one can fix their driveways until we dry out a lot because they are too soft for the equipment you have to use to haul in and spread new base and gravel on top of it.

What can you do, though? That's this part of the Great Plains for you----always seems like it is feast or famine, drought or flood. Goldilocks wouldn't be happy here because, weather-wise, things are never just right.

I'm in SW OKC, I have recorded 26 1/2" for May. 10" (or more ) fell in one night to start this little show from Mother Nature. Hopefully we can start to dry out this week. Like everybody else it is a waiting game, waiting for the ground to at least firm up so we can start on all the repairs and clean up. This afternoon I was down in the ditch in front of the house trimming and there used to be a very large chunk of concrete that the tornado of 2013 left there,guess what it is gone donot know where it went the flood waters took it somewhere. It took a tremendous amount of water to move that piece of concrete, I can't believe it didn't take out a fence post or two?

Tomorrow I will start on my LONG list of outdoors things to do, the housework will be put on hold for a while. I hope I don't have any visitors HA!

Hope everybody gets some things done this week. Stay safe.

Remember when?

It seems like it was so, so long ago.

In early July, we were sitting here with slightly over 54" of rain recorded for the year. Here it is, two months later, and we are sitting here with slightly over 54" of rain recorded for the year. It is maddening. We're now at 58 days without significant rainfall recorded in Love County, and with no rain likely today, I think we'll be at 59 days without significant rainfall by the end of today.....and 60 days by the end of tomorrow.

Despite going over 8 weeks with almost no rainfall, so far 2015 remains our rainiest year ever. We only need to get a little under 6" of rain to set a new record and end 2015 as the wettest year ever for our county. In early July I would have said we'd absolutely get that record, and I do think we will get another 6" before the end of 2015, but the dry spell down here has tested everyone's patience. At first, the dry spell was sort of welcome because it let folks who had property damage from the flooding get out there and repair some of the damage as the standing water dried up, but now the dry spell has gone on for too long and nobody's happy about that. Well, the country road crews might be happy because they've been able to do a lot of work repairing flood damage to local roadways.

The rain and the cooler weather in the forecast for later this week should stop our dry spell in its tracks, but you never know. The rain could miss us like most of the rain has for the last two months. I just look at the forecast every day and take those moisture forecasts with a grain of salt. Even if we get an inch of rain this coming week, we still will be in Moderate Drought. It is so much harder to get out of drought than it is to go into drought.

Up here in Adair County it's been a different story. In 2012 and 2013, we had almost three months with very little rain--less than 2 inches each year, but last year and this we've had no longer than a little over 2 weeks with out rain. After the 16.15 inches in May, we had 6.9 in June, 12.58 in July and 4.63 in August. Nothing in September yet, but we still have deep soil moisture even if the top few inches is getting dry. The only downside to all this rain is that it makes for a lot of mowing and brushhogging. A cousin was complaining the other day about hogging down the ragweed, horseweed, and perrila 3 times over the summer and haveing it needed a fourth time right now. It's been a good year for making hay though.

Mulberryknob, lucky you. Our hay making is over unless we start getting water.

Just couldnt resist bringing up the recent past. How quickly things change. I am not looking at the forcast because I am afraid I will scare away the rain. We need it so bad. I know 1" will not do a lot of good but I will take it.

what surprises me are the trees, they are showing signs of stress and they shouldn't. Maybe the shallow feeder roots are causing the stress?

The heat is bad, it's not even cooling off at night. If we can just get through the next couple of days at least it will cool of.

as said in another post, waiting patiently for El Niño.

Dorothy, I shouldn't be surprised our rain stopped falling----after all, we had a whole year's worth of rainfall just in May and June alone. Mother Nature must have looked at our rainfall totals at that point and decided we'd had enough. We're still waiting for more. I'd rather have had my rain more spread out over the whole summer like yours was.

Stockergal, The trees here were showing heat stress and maybe moisture stress as early as the first or second week in August, and I was shocked. All the deep soil moisture still didn't stop them from getting stressed and dropping leaves. Our cottonwoods are almost 100% naked, and the honey locust are not far behind, and the elms are just a bit behind them.

Even the oak trees have dropped some leaves, and I have a theory about that. Back when it rained a lot, the trees put out tons and tons of new growth. Literally every day you could see new leaves and branches just getting longer and longer and longer. I bet some of our trees grew several feet in height at the top of the crown. (This has resulted in internet issues because the suddenly-much-taller trees now are blocking our wireless internet receiver from picking up the signal consistently, but that is a whole different issue.) All that foliage thrived on the water that produced it....and then the rain stopped. Once everything started drying out, the trees couldn't support the huge volume of new leaves so they started dropping them as a survival mechanism. I have had to rake up the leaves in the front yard and on the north side of the house in August because otherwise the copperheads and rattlesnakes would blend right in and would be hard to spot. I've never had to rake up leaves in August before.

Some parts of our county had brief pop-up showers yesterday that dropped a few hundredths of an inch, but the rain went south and east and north of us and missed us. We're hoping all the rain won't miss us this week, but every day that passes, the amount the QPF forecasts for us drops a bit, so I'm going to just stop looking at it because it is discouraging.

I hope El Nino performs as expected and brings us good rainfall in autumn and in winter, or we're in trouble down here, drought-wise. All El Ninos are not the same, so let's hope this one doesn't behave oddly and let us down.

Below, I'll link the 60-day rainfall map, since it has been the lack of rainfall for the last 60 days that has dried up all the areas down here that had too much rain in spring and earliest summer. It is shocking how little rain has fallen in many parts of southcentral and southeastern Oklahoma during the last 60 days.

60-Day Rainfall Map from OK Mesonet

Now, here's the rainfall for the last 30 days, and you can see how the lack of rain really spread more northward in the last month.

30-Day Rainfall Map from OK Mesonet