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~ I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I Vl. RAINFALL DISTRIBUTION Seasonal rainfall in Western Kansas in 2001 turned out to be truly "mixed bag," either we had good rainfall periods or very little--feast or famine--the adage goes. Probably it can best be described as saying the growing season was very wet in May, dry in June, generally above average moisture in July, dry again in August and a wet September for a few areas. Of course there were some exceptions to the description, but for most of the target area this fit the scenario fairly well. The wide variability in the May - August average rainfall can be seen in Table 9, below. Stanton and Finney counties both showed a 41 %greater than nonnal average precipitation accumulation for those four months with Gove and Kearny at 37% and 34% above average. Although Finney shows it was "officially" very moist, eastern Finney was among the driest parts of the target area of the season. The southeastern counties in the target area: Ford, Haskell and Gray counties were the driest at 32%, 28% and 10% below average, respectively. Wallace County, however, stuck out on the opposite corner, in the northwest part of the target area, with 15% below average. Despite the fact that 9 of the 14 WKWMP counties registered above nonnal rainfall in the May - August period, averages just don't tell the entire rainfall story very well in a year like this one. MAY - AUGUST 2001 RAINFALL IWKWMP TarQet Areal COUNlY TOTAL Normal Departure Change (inches) (Inches) (inches) l"I FINNEY 15.64 11.09 4.55 41 FORD 8.08 11.92 -3.84 -32 GOVE 17.53 12.83 4.70 37 GRANT 11 .49 10.16 1.33 13 GRAY 11.97 13.33 -1.36 -10 GREELEY 10.56 9.80 0.76 8 HAMILTON 12.03 9.50 2.53 27 HASKELL 8.21 11.34 -3.13 -28 KEARNY 13.75 10.29 3.46 34 LANE 10.99 11.37 -0.38 -3 SCOTT 12.88 11.38 1.50 13 STANTON 14.16 10.01 4.15 41 STEVENS 10.34 11.16 -0.82 -7 WALLACE 9.52 11.16 -1.64 -15 WICHITA 12.58 10.15 2.43 24 Table 9 37