Montgomery washed away an 87-year-old rainfall record on Thursday, with 5.73 inches falling in the bucket, National Weather Service data shows.

That easily swamps the old record for the date of 2.52 inches set in 1930. During the heaviest part of the deluge, Montgomery got 5.03 inches in a little over an hour, said Gary Goggins, a meteorologist with the NWS office in Birmingham. And the shocking numbers don’t stop there.

Through Thursday, Montgomery has recorded 56.94 inches of rainfall for the year, NWS tallies reflect. The average yearly total is 53.01 inches, data shows. That puts Montgomery at 22.86 inches, or almost 2 feet, above normal rainfall, year to date.

Bo Morris, of Autauga County, would like to see a little break in the rain train.

“I’m to where I’m cutting grass at the house twice a week now,” he said. “I could really be cutting it three times a week, but I just refuse to do that.”

And more wet stuff is on the horizon, for like the next month or so, long range forecasts show. A persistent pattern of a high pressure ridge over the western part of the nation and a low pressure trough on the eastern side is to blame, Goggins said.

“What we are seeing with this pattern is larger areas of instability that are more conducive to thunderstorm development,” he said. “That coupled with the normal summertime conditions of abundant Gulf moisture gives the thunderstorms that do form plenty of moisture to work with.

“Just look at what happened in Montgomery yesterday. You have an incredible amount of rainfall in a very short period of time. Meanwhile, 20 miles down the road, those folks may not have received any rain at all.”

If there is any good news in all this, the heavy rains are localized, Goggins said. That leads to flash flood risks, but overall no widespread river flooding is expected in this pattern, he said. But the saturated ground can’t take much more moisture. So the NWS office in Birmingham has issued a flash flood watch for most of Central Alabama, from Autauga and Montgomery counties east, until this evening.

On Thursday, many areas got 1 to 2 inches of rainfall, and isolated areas got 4 to 6 inches, the weather bulletin reads.

High rain chances are in the forecast through Sept. 1, Goggins said.

“We will see a 50 to 60 percent chance of rain for most afternoons,” he said. “Those are much higher than the usual 20-30 percent chance we see each day.”

The Climate Prediction Center is calling for “above normal” chances of rainfall for the region to persist at least through the end of August and into the first week or so of September. And the three month outlook is calling for a 50-50 shot of above normal rain chances for the period.