Thursday’s storm wasn’t a total dud—more than 1 inch of rain drenched several Long Island communities and some 3,000 LIPA customers lost power during the height of the storm Thursday night.
“We got quite a bit of rain,” said Tim Morrin, meteorologist at the Upton-based National Weather Service.
With Thursday’s rain storm, which dropped nearly 1.5 inches on Montauk and more than an inch in at least five other Suffolk County communities, June 2013 is on its way to becoming the wettest June on record—and there’s still 16 days to go.
The current record is 10.8 inches, which was recorded in June 2003, according to the NWS, whose calculations goes back to the 1980s. This month’s total already stands somewhere between 8 and 9 inches. If the trend continues, it’s likely that the decade-old record will fall.
More flooding is also possible because there’s “not much capacity for the Earth to absorb much more,” even with moderate rainfall, Morrin said.
Thursday’s storm came less than a week after a record-setting storm pounded LI with upwards of 5 inches of rain.
But early predictions of up to 4 inches of rain never manifested and the NWS even cancelled a flood watch it had issued a day earlier.
The Island will get a brief break from the wet weather this weekend with a sunny forecast for Saturday and decent weather predicted during the day Sunday.
But the weather is expected to quickly shift back to what seems to be the norm this June, with showers and possible thunderstorms in the forecast for Monday and Tuesday.
As for the outages, the majority of LIPA ratepayers who lost power Thursday regained electricity overnight.
