Powder River Examiner -

If this year's weather has felt a little like we were living Seattle, Washington or Anchorage, Alaska instead of Eastern Montana, there's a good reason for that feeling: on September 28th, Broadus passed its all-time precipitation record for the year, with 21.58" of precitation. That's for January through December, which means we still have three months of precipitation to record.

The previous annual precipitation record came in 1923, with 21.38". Weather data for Broadus began in 1920, but the records for August 1925 through January 1937 are missing. It is doubtful that a record for precipitation came out of the missing records from the dustbowl of the '30s, though much of the 1920s were considered "good years", so perhaps a precipitation record happened during that period but is unaccounted for in the weather archives. Even with the missing records, nearly 100 years of accumulated data reveal 2019 to be a really wet year by any measurement.

On October 1st, Broadus residents woke up to our first snowfall of the season, with a couple inches of heavy, wet snow on the ground. That's our first snowfall since May 18th, for a whopping 4.5 months between snows.

Broadus finished the month of September with 4.59" of rain, to end the month with 21.92 for the year. No doubt the October 1st snowstorm will add greatly to this total. As I type these words on the morning of October 1st, the snow still falls outside my office window, the lights flicker as trees branches laid heavy with snow ground out the power lines, and the moisture totals for the storm are yet to be totaled.

A sad pair of sunflowers droop under the weight of heavy snow, which fell the morning of October 1st. The snow broke off tree branches and generally made a mess of things, as well as causing a two hour power outage in Broadus on Tuesday morning.

September started out hot, with the mercury nearly breaking into triple digits on September 4th, topping out at 99 degrees. Broadus did not hit 100 in 2019 (nor did Seattle, where temps topped out at 95 on June 12).

The mercury didn't officially dip below freezing in Broadus during the month of September. In the early morning hours of October 1st, the temps dropped below freezing, turning the precipitation into a solid state of snow, forcing the snowplows out on the roads and residents to scramble to locate their ice scrapers and winter apparel.

For what's its worth, Seattle's driest year on record was 1944, with 19.85" of precipitation. The mean annual precipitation there is 35.99", so we have a ways to go to before thinking of growing giant western red cedars to carve into totem poles.

Anchorage's last measurable snowfall came on April 24th of this year. Anchorage's mean annual snowfall from 1955 until present is 73.5", a number which Broadus eclipsed in 2018.