Welcome to June! Today marks the start of meteorological summer.
I am fairly certain that the majority of New Englanders, if asked, would tell you we had a horribly cold and rainy spring this year.
Sorry to disappoint, but you would be totally wrong.
Spring in New England is a strange phenomenon…it seems each and every year, expectations far outweigh reality. This spring was, in fact, warmer and drier than average! And, honestly, it wasn’t even that close!
TEMPERATURES…
The vast majority of March days were above average, and the month finished 3.1 degrees above the norm. We even set a new high temperature record on March 10th (75 degrees).
April was our “coolest” month this spring (compared to norms) and it finished almost exactly AVERAGE. We had several days in the 70s including a 3-day stretch in the middle of the month.
Temperatures in May finished 2.4 degrees above average in Boston and that included two record highs of 96 and 91 degrees!
This graphic may be the best illustration of just how “mild” this spring was.
Boston exceeded the average number of 60, 70, 80 and 90 degrees days.
PRECIPITATION…
Both Boston and Worcester finished with well BELOW average snowfall this spring.
Worcester had just 2.6″ of snow, nearly a foot below the average.
Boston had 1.9″ of snow, about half a foot below average.
All three months had below average precip./rainfall as well.
Precipitation in Boston was nearly 4″ below average this spring, exacerbating the drought conditions already present.
No doubt you are shaking your head right now in disbelief at what I have just presented. I think there are two reasons for the disconnect.
First, New Englanders have a distorted view and expectation for what spring truly is. After a cold, snowy winter the expectation is for a sudden change to warm, sunny days come March, April and May…HA! Are you new here?
Blame it on the Ocean…it is so hard to get any sort of sustained warmth here in the spring months with a frigid Atlantic right next door. More often than not, while the rest of the Country is rapidly warming, our little corner of the Country lags far behind.
Secondly, I think we tend to base our seasonal weather memories and judgements more on how nice the weekends were.
And much like last spring, we had an inordinate amount of cool, wet weekend days this year.
Of the 27 spring weekend days, 18 had some rainfall and 16 had below average temperatures.
Most egregious, we had 7 days in May when high temperatures did not go above 50 degrees…all 7 were on either a Friday, Saturday or Sunday.
And to boot, 9 of the 10 weekend days recorded some rainfall! It wasn’t always a lot, but we did tend towards a lot of gray/damp weekends this past month.
Alas, however you felt about Spring 2026, it is now in the rearview mirror. June is typically one of the nicest months to be in New England. Average highs reach 80 by months end, and we also experience the longest days of the entire year.
Right on cue, we are forecasting 70s and 80s for the rest of this week.
As for the wet weekend trend, we got some work to do. As of this writing, we do have some rain in the forecast next weekend. Let’s hope that is not a continuing theme of meteorological summer.
