PORTLAND (AP) – Last month went down as the third-coldest and 10th-wettest May on record, confirming what most Mainers already knew: The weather’s been lousy.

Preliminary data from the National Weather Service show that Portland’s average temperature for the month was 49.3 degrees, which was 4.5 degrees below normal. The coldest May in 135 years of record-keeping was in 1967, when the temperature averaged 47.3 degrees.

Portland got 6.4 inches of rain for the month, or 68 percent more than usual. It was third-wettest meteorological spring, the three-month period from March through May, with nearly 20 inches of precipitation.

All of which is making some people long for the two-year drought the state experienced from 2001 into 2003.

“People are probably ready for a dry spell, anyway. And maybe some global warming,” said Steve Capriola, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray.

The cold and wet wasn’t confined just to Portland.

The average May temperature in Bangor came in at 50.4 degrees, or 4.3 degrees below normal, with 52 percent more rain than normal. Concord, N.H., had an average May temperature of 51.2 degrees, or 4.8 degrees below normal, and got 3.91 inches of rain, making it the sixth-wettest May in the last decade. The wettest May on record was in 1984, when 9.52 inches of rain fell in Concord, according to the National Weather Service.

There’s no way to sugarcoat the gloomy weather this spring.

During one stretch in Portland beginning on May 3, below-normal temperatures were felt on 23 out of 24 days. Between April 20 and the end of May, precipitation fell on 32 out of 42 days, giving meteorologists reason to joke about the location of their office in the town of Gray.

“It was gray in Gray, definitely,” Capriola said.

The rest of Maine had lousy weather as well.

The average daily temperature across northern and eastern Maine was roughly 3 to 5 degrees below normal for the month, said Vic Nouhan in the weather service’s Caribou office. Rainfall ran from 3.5 inches in the northern stretches, to about 9 inches – or almost three times the average – along the eastern Maine coast.

“Everybody got cloudy, cool and damp conditions,” Nouhan said.

AP-ES-06-01-05 1221EDT