It's not your imagination. The Capital Region has experienced more violent thunderstorms than usual this summer.

The Capital Region continued to clean up Monday from the latest in a series of multi-day thunderstorm systems rumbling through the area.

The storms have brought high winds, above-normal amounts of rain, flooding and thousands of power outages.

Rainfall totals through Aug. 19 Altamont - 2.8 inches Queensbury - 2.29 inches Albany International Airport - 3.1 inches Albany - 5.25 inches Niskayuna - 4.65 inches Brunswick - 3.45 inches Wynantskill - 5.86 inches Saratoga Springs - 3.57 inches Source: National Weather Service See More Collapse

"We have had quite a few thunderstorms," said Mike Evans, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. "We have issued quite a few thunderstorm warnings for our part of the country over the last several weeks after the first half of the summer was pretty quiet."

The main culprit behind the series of storms is a stronger-than-usual jet stream, Evans said.

"So we've had our usual heat and humidity but usually in the month of August the jet stream gets very, very weak. But this year the jet stream has stayed more like what you might see in June," he said. "So as a result some of our thunderstorms have been a little bit stronger than what we might normally see."

Albany typically receives around 3.5 inches of rain in August. As of Monday, the official total for the month was 3.1 inches, Evans said. But some places have seen more than 5 inches of rainfall this month.

The storms have National Grid's restoration crews continually battling power outages. The company has dealt with around 120,000 outages since July 4, spokesman Patrick Stella said.

"We drill for this sort of situation but it's becoming more regular and longer term than usual," he said, adding that the restoration work becomes harder on work crews in the summer with the heat.

Many of the outages, because of the storms' tracks, have focused on Schenectady and Saratoga counties, Stella said.

This past weekend's storms knocked out power to a combined total of more than 50,000 customers, according to tallies of the company outage map.

This summer National Grid introduced a new text alert system. Customers can sign up to receive a text during a storm asking if their power is out, which helps the company identify outages quickly.

"A lot of people think we automatically know when your power is out, we don't," he said.

Some of what is happening is simply bad luck, said Nick Bassill, a meteorologist at the University of Albany.

"Friday, that storm was the only damage-causer in eastern New York, so in a sense, Albany just got unlucky in that it was over Albany rather than 30 miles south or 10 miles east," he said.

The consecutive days of rain and humidity creates a loop that feeds the next storm moving in, Bassill said.

Behind that stronger-than-normal jet stream, late in the summer a large high pressure system develops in the Central Plains. When the two systems align just right, the combination with hot and humid weather creates bigger storms, Bassill said.

In that case, what would be an ordinary thunderstorm with rain and little bit of lighting develops into something that's more organized and more damaging, he said.

The Capital Region will see at least one more jet-stream-driven system this week before a few dry days are forecast. A system on Wednesday could cause the same type of powerful storms that passed through the area over the weekend, according to the National Weather Service.