by Barney Leach
If April showers bring May flowers, our May flower crop may be as skimpy as our April showers were. We had only five days with measureable rain fall with a one-day greatest total of 0.53 inch on April 13. Normal rainfall for April is 3.30 inches. Our total rainfall for the year stands at 12.33 inches. Normal through April is 14.61 inches.
April temperatures were below normal with a couple of lows in the upper 30’s and highs mostly in the 70’s and low to mid 80’s. Low temperature for the month was 38 degrees on April 16. High temperature was 86 degrees on April 28 and 29. We do have a weather oddity for the year in that we are nearly half-way through spring and our warmest temperature of the year so far was 87 degrees back in the winter on March 17.
As per the National Weather Service, April 2018 was the fifth coolest April on record for the Dallas/Fort Worth area and the third coolest on record for the Waco area. It appears to have been somewhere around the same for us.
2018 RAINFALL BY MONTH IN INCHES
Month Rainfall (inches) Normal Departure
January 0.74 3.62 -2.88
February 4.58 3.36 +1.22
March 5.83 4.33 +1.50
April 1.18 3.30 -2.12
Totals 12.33 14.61 -2.28
LOOKING AHEAD TO MAY: May is normally our second wettest month of the year with a normal of 4.59 inches of rain. The 2018 Farmer’s Almanac predicts below normal rainfall and near normal temperatures in May for east Texas.
Normal rainfall values currently used were derived from averages over the twenty-year period from 1997 through 2016.
The above rainfall and temperature data was recorded by Barney Leach, former volunteer co-op weather volunteer for the National Weather Service and former weather volunteer for Channel 8 in Dallas, Channel 10 in Waco, and radio station KNES in Fairfield.
