Dixon Then and Now: Yes, May's Been Cool, But Not as Cool as 1977

The cold weather in May this year – nearly 20 degrees colder than average on some days – confirms that with weather, the unusual is normal.

Such temperature swings also cause one to wonder if global warming is actually happening. For example, last summer in Dixon wasn’t as hot as usual. But if the ocean levels are rising, there’s little to argue about.

May’s cold temperatures led me to research weather extremes in Dixon’s past. It’s not hard to go online these days to ferret out the figures.

But first, a little story. Bill Schroeder tipped me off to a May Fair in 1957 where the annual affair was rained on over the entire weekend. Said the Dixon Tribune, “ … there was never a storm to compare to the one which hit town Friday night and lingered through Sunday, causing the traditional parade to be … a whisper of its usual grandeur, and all grandstand entertainment to be cancelled.”

Fair goers missed a rodeo, horse show, auto thrill show and motorcycle races that year. And that May Fair took place mid-month!

The Tribune continued: “(The) hit of the (shortened) parade, and appropriate of almost the entire fair, was the queen’s float. The gals, and students who built it, refused to be daunted. The queen and her aides switched (formal dresses) for bathing suits and proceeded down (First) Street in a heavy rain. … It was probably one of the wettest parades ever held in the state.” High school bands pulled out of the parade, probably worried about damage to their expensive uniforms.

The carnival area turned so muddy that hay was brought in and strewn on the ground, but still “ … many people found themselves sinking to their ankles.” Remarkably, a record attendance of 9,698 was recorded on Sunday that year.

Now for some local weather records.

I looked at temperature records for Davis and Vacaville between 1893 and 2009 (Dixon doesn’t have a weather-recording station) to arrive at the following weather extremes:

Temperature-wise for May, the record high was 109 in 1910, at the end of the month. The record low for May was 30 in 1921, at the beginning of the month. As I write this on the 20th of May, my own weather recordkeeping recorded a one day’s low of 45 so far this month. Doesn’t even come close.

The average daily high temperature for the entire month of May has been 80 degrees over the past 117 years. So far this month (this year), according to my own recordkeeping, our average high has been 66 degrees. It’s definitely been a cool month. But it's not as low as May's average high temperature of 58 recorded in Davis in 1977 and in Vacaville in 1933.

If you’re interested in the highest-in-recorded-history temperature for the Dixon area, it was 116 in July, 1925. The lowest low was a bone-chilling 12 degrees in December, 1932. Those kinds of temperatures are hard on farmers’ crops and fruit trees.

Looking at historical precipitation for the month of May in the Dixon area, the most ever recorded for the month was 3.83 inches in 1905 in Vacaville, with a one-day record of 2.13 inches set in Davis in 1996. So far this month in Dixon, I’ve recorded nearly an inch of rain, while the historical average for May is around a half-inch.

The average rainfall per year in Vacaville is 24 inches with a record of 49 inches set in 1983; in Davis, the average rainfall per year is 17 inches, with a record of 38 inches set also in 1983. I’m sure there are many in the area who can remember a wet 1983.

Then we can look at snowfall. The 1893-to-2010 weather records for Vacaville show two December snowfalls of 20 and 10 inches, and at least six snowfalls in the one-to-two-inch category. Of course, the mountains north of Vacaville get dusted with snow fairly often. Davis had a five-inch snowfall one January and four snowfalls ranging from two to three inches during that 127-year-period. I’m told that during one 1930s storm, Dixon received a foot of snow.

It’s always an exciting for locals to see snow on the ground, and I was able to locate many Dixon snow photos in the library archives taken by excited photographers – which are attached to this column. There was even enough snow one winter for kids to make a snowman.

I grew up in the Midwest where tornadoes and violent thunderstorms are expected, and was curious about the tornado record in our area. Looking at the period from 1950 to present, there’s no record of a tornado in Dixon. There are, though, records of a small tornado in Vacaville (January 2005), in the vicinity of the Western Railroad Museum south of Dixon (May 1998), and one in West Sacramento in 2005 which is the only one of this bunch listing property damage.

Larger ones are possible. On a February afternoon in Sacramento in 1978, a category two tornado hit, scouring the ground over a two-mile course and doing over $250,000 in damage.

Fortunately, when one runs out of topics of conversation with people, there’s always the weather to fall back on.