Record Precipitation set on Sunday
(Statement made June 18, 2018, at 138am MDT, from Keno)

Yesterday (Sunday, June 17) at the Crestone/Baca weather station, a new record for total precipitation for the date was set when .73" (or seventy three hundreds of an inch) of rain and hail fell. This breaks the old record of .30", set back in 1999.

Most of that total (.71") fell in a 2 hour period between 5 and 7 pm. The remaining .02" fell between midnight and 12:55 am Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) on Monday June 18. However, because the National Weather Service doesn't observe Daylight Saving Time and stays on Mountain Standard Time (MST) year round (like the rest of us should do), any precipitation that falls after midnight and up until 1am MDT, counts as falling on the day before, since only MST is used to observe the weather. Also, since our online weather station is so very hard to adjust precipitation totals that it records, I do not bother to ever change those totals showing on there, as only the info that the government weather station collects, counts in what I record and what I report.

First Thunderstorm of 2018 finally hits the local Crestone area

(Statement made June 17, 2018, at 630pm MDT, from Keno)

Today, at around 5 pm MDT, the greater Crestone area saw a moderate size thunderstorm descend on the area that dropped .40 of an inch of much needed rain (this amount is also a record high for the date). Normally in mid June that is isn't newsworthy, but this one was, since it was the very first thunderstorm of the year to hit here.

This storm breaks the all time record for the latest ever first thunderstorm of the year occurring in this region. Although some dates are missing in the record books for the first date of thunderstorms recorded throughout the years, dating back to when records were first kept on this (in 1983), the latest date for the first such storm of the year to hit in the books, happened on May 12, 2007. So we didn't only see the old record being broken today - we saw it shattered!

At the very moment that I'm typing this statement out, pea size hail is starting to fall. The record for the latest first hail in the greater Crestone area to occur is June 18, 2013, so we just missed trying that record by just one day (or in reality, just by a few hours)! Crestone of course, sees more hail than any other areas on Earth along with the Colorado Front Range, and the foothills of the Himalayas in India.

Latest Drought Info
(Statement made June 14, 2018, from the NWS) 

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