Drought continues with lack of April showers

While the old adage, “April showers bring May flowers,” is true of most years that cannot be said of this year. 
I was mulling over some new adages that might have been more appropriate like “April drought brings May burnout” or “April dry causes May flowers to go bye-bye,” but nothing seemed very appropriate or flowed quite right. 
Regardless, the lack of water in April continues the slide into drier conditions for the area.  As a side note, this is being written in May during a week of good moisture that has fallen across the area, which, I hope, is a continued sign of things to come for the rest of May.
The story, for April, continues to be the dry conditions plaguing the area.  While total precipitation for April was greater than the previous three months combined, it was still only about one-third of the normal monthly total. 
That puts us at more than 3 1/2 inches below normal for the year and, in an even more ominous sign, more than 10 1/2 inches below normal since the great floods of June 2014.
Temperatures were warmer than normal for the month with highs nearly 5 degrees warmer and lows just over 3 degrees warmer.
This continues an overall trend for this year where January, March and now April have seen significantly warmer than normal temperatures with February being the odd month out with well below normal temperatures. 
April's warmest temperature of 86 degrees, oddly enough, occurred on April 1 with its monthly low coming only three days later at 23 degrees.
As stated above, we are starting to see some good rainfall for the first half of May.  We will see if this continues and we can get some above-normal amounts for the month to try and cut into the current rainfall deficit.
 
A blog of daily summary and other interesting weather events for the Luverne area is at http://luvernemnweather.blogspot.com. Thone can be reached at tathone@gmail.com.