From the Tennessee Valley Authority:
If you wondered if it would ever stop raining in May, there’s a reason.
While we were slightly below normal rainfall for the calendar year at the end of March, the month of May made up for it.
April and May were both above normal for rainfall. As of June 1, we are at about 124% of normal rain for the calendar year so far in the Tennessee River Basin.
How wet was it in May? This was our THIRD wettest May in 135 years of keeping records.
The average rainfall for the month across the basin was 8.1 inches. (Normal for the month is 4.31 inches)
That means our rainfall was 188% of normal for the month of May.
Some areas recorded higher rainfall totals than that – Chickamauga Dam rain gauge measured 8.26 inches. The rain gauge at our Guntersville Dam recorded 10.64 inches of rainfall for May.
(The record for rainfall in May was in 2003 with 9.15 inches.)
All this rainfall adds up to erase our abnormal and moderate drought conditions across the Tennessee Valley.
As we noted around Memorial Day, all our reservoirs are at or slightly above normal summer elevations, except for Cherokee Lake which is slightly below normal due to lack of rainfall in that watershed.