Storm Reports, May Stats

While there wasn't a whole lot of widespread severe weather yesterday across Central and Western New York, the one area that did seem to get hit hardest was in fact our area. Most of the grotonweather.com forecast range (Tompkins, Cortland and Southern Cayuga Counties) ended up under a severe thunderstorm warning at one point or another as two separate severe storms crossed the area.

The first storm tracked across Southern Tompkins and Cortland Counties in the early afternoon, well ahead of the cold front. This storm produced numerous hail and wind reports, especially once it moved into Broome and Chenango Counties. The second storm came through at about 6pm. This storm took out trees in Cortland and Locke, while hitting West Groton with 3/4" hail, with some smaller hail in Groton.

I have overlayed yesterday's storm reports on Google Earth and marked a few of the towns for reference. The blue circles with a "W" represent a wind damage report, while the green circles with an "H" represent hail. Not a huge outbreak by any means, but considering the lack of severe storms elsewhere, we got hit decently hard.


Onto other things now...did you think May seemed abnormally cold? Well, if you did, you are correct. In fact, the differences between this May and last May are quite staggering. Our average high this May was a very chilly 64.0 degrees. This ended up 12 degrees colder than last May, which averaged 76.1 degrees. In fact, there were only 3 days in which our high this past month reached 76 degrees! (Those days were the 7th at 76, the 26th at 82, and the 31st and 76). Our warmest day this May was 82, much lower than last year's 92 and even lower than 2006's 95 degree day. On the whole, it was the coldest May on my records (2003-present) by three degrees. We also had our coldest nights, with our average lows falling below 40 for the first time.