Since the beginning of this meteorological spring season, the city of Chicago, Illinois, has already seen close to ten inches of rain and counting.² To be precise, as of April 14, the halfway point of the season, which runs from the start of March through the end of May, the city has received 9.29 inches of rainfall.³ We've seen more rain since then, which has taken us over the ten-inch mark, and more is on its way, but I wanted to highlight that statistic. The only other year we recorded more rainfall by April 14 was 1983, with 9.58 inches.³ That year would also go on to be our wettest spring on record, with a total of 17.51 inches of rain.³ At the pace we've been receiving so far this season, we're on track to replace that record. For additional context, this is the 155th year we've been keeping rainfall records.⁴
Meanwhile, while countless communities in the Chicago area have been flooded, much of the rest of the country is facing severe drought. Look at this drought map from the April 23, 2026, episode of NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas⁵:
Then, of course, there is all of the other weather that we've been experiencing. Dangerous thunderstorms, lightning, wind, hail, tornadoes, tornado-forming cloud rotation, and polarizing, sometimes overnight, switches between warm and cold temperatures. It's been a confusing, scary, and stressful spring so far, to say the least. Not to mention the random snowstorms that other parts of the country have been seeing this month, quickly followed by temperatures in the seventies, eighties, and even nineties.
What is our weather? Furthermore, if this is what our spring is like, what will our upcoming summer and fall look like? This past meteorological winter was already abnormal, with unusually fluctuating temperatures throughout the season, and inches of snow already falling in northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana by November 10⁶, weeks ahead of the start of meteorological winter on December 1. On December 1, the city already had 8.7 inches of snow⁷ on the ground from a storm that hit primarily two days earlier, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Along the Wisconsin-Illinois state border, in the city of Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, that storm dumped a foot of snow.⁸ And, by December 7, 17.1 inches of snow had already fallen in Chicago, nearly as much as the 17.6 inches of snow the city saw throughout the entire previous snowfall season.¹˒⁹
¹ It's worth noting that, although the 2025-2026 snow season, which runs from July 2025 to June 2026, saw 17.6 inches of snow in Chicago, usually, the city can expect around 38.4 inches of snowfall. The most recorded snowfall in a single season was 89.7 inches in the 1978-1979 season, and the least was 9.8 inches in the 1920-1921 season.¹⁰