Rainfall · Kendall County · Boerne, Texas
Every month of rain gauged near Boerne since 1893 — the heart of the Texas Hill Country, where limestone lets a wet spring soak straight into the Trinity Aquifer and a dry year draws the water table down. Eight ways to read the same long record.
Each column averages the rain over the trailing 2 to 24 months. Read a row left to right: red means it has been running dry over that window, green means wet. A dry spell shows up first in the short columns and creeps rightward as it deepens into a real drought.
Rolling-average rainfall · most recent months at the bottom. A dot marks a month not yet recorded.
The same idea stretched over the whole record. Left to right runs 1893 to today; top to bottom is the averaging window — one month at the top down to twenty-four. A single dry month is a thin red streak up top; a multi-year drought is a deep red wedge that sinks all the way down.
Rain adds up from January onward. Every year since 1893 is a faint climbing line; together they fill the envelope between the driest and wettest years on record. The dashed line is a normal year's pace — and the gold line is 2026 so far, tracking ahead of or behind normal.
Each shape is the spread of one calendar month's rainfall across 133 years — wide where the month is unpredictable, with a long tail reaching up into the flood years. The white tick is the median; the gold dot is the wettest that month has ever been. Two swells stand out — the May and September rains.
One stripe per year, 1893 at the left. Warm ochre is a dry year, deep blue a wet one — the further from the 33-inch average, the more saturated. A century of boom and bust in a single band.
Diverging scale centered on the 33.3″ long-term mean. Hatched bar = 2026, partial year.
The same data wound into a clock. Twelve months around the dial, 1893 at the center spiralling out to today. Two brighter arcs emerge — the Hill Country's May and September rains — while a whole dim ring marks a drought year.
How far each year ran above or below normal. Blue billows upward in the wet years; rust sinks below the line through the droughts — including the 1950s drought of record and the modern dry spells of 2011 and 2022.
Distance from the baseline = inches above or below the 33.3″ normal.
Pick a year and watch it fall. The cistern fills to that year's total against the etched long-term average — the same rain that, in the wet years, recharges the aquifer beneath these hills.
Water level scaled to the wettest year on record. Dashed line = 33.3″ average.