On This Date: Dust Bowl Heat, Rainfall Records Smashed
The Dust Bowl was infamous for its agricultural devastation in the Plains. It was also known for some of the most infamous heat waves, even floods, and not just in summer.
From May 28-31, 1934, 91 years ago, a blistering heat wave smashed all-time May records in 11 states, according to weather historian Christopher Burt, all plotted in the map below.
Highs soared into the 110s in six of those state, including Langdon, North Dakota; Maple Plain, Minnesota; and Maryville, Missouri. A 108 degree high in Morden, Manitoba, was a Canadian national May record, Burt noted.
Four different locations in Michigan's Upper Peninsula hit 100 degrees on May 31. The next day, Houghton Lake set Michigan's all-time June record, soaring to 107 degrees.
One year later, a pair of incredible rainfalls happened in late May.
On May 30, 1935, two separate rain gauges, one northeast of Colorado Springs and another just north of Burlington, Colorado, recorded 24 inches of rainfall in just six hours. The resulting flash floods killed at least 21 and caused $8-10 million damage, among the state's biggest floods, Burt detailed in a 2013 Weather Underground blog post. Heavy rain also triggered catastrophic flooding along the Republican River in Nebraska, claiming 92 lives, there.
Then, before dawn on May 31, 22 inches of rain fell in just 2 hours and 45 minutes near D'Hanis, Texas, about 45 miles west of San Antonio. That is a world record rainfall for that period of time, according to Burt.
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
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