June is Minnesota’s wettest month, and this year it lived up to its billing in spades.

So much rain fell during this year’s sixth month that rivers all across Minnesota jumped their banks and massive flooding swept away homes, drowned downtowns, swamped parks and farm fields, and closed roads.

Though precipitation fell on 16 of June’s 30 days, the 7.27 inches recorded at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport as of Sunday morning didn’t set any precipitation records in the Twin Cities. Not by a long shot.

As soggy as June was, totals in the rain bucket at the Twin Cities official weather observation station made this year only the 14th wettest June on record, well off the all-time mark of 11.67 inches from 1874, according to Minnesota State Climatology Office.

In southern Minnesota, however, new high-water marks were set in Windom, where 14.58 inches of rain fell, breaking the old record of 11.06 inches that had stood since 1914. Even more fell in Wells, in Faribault County on the Iowa border, where 14.94 inches set a new record, besting the previous high of 12.58 set in 2013.

Owatonna entered the record books, too, with its 13.13 inches. But no place may have seen more rain this past month than Faribault. There, the 16.63 inches of rain smashed the old mark of 12.96 set in 2014 and is believed to have been the highest total of any of the National Weather Service’s reporting stations.

Many other cities made it into double-digit rainfall, according to readings turned in to the Weather Service by volunteer observers.

Typically, the Twin Cities sees about 4.58 inches of rain in June, but this year has brought about 2.8 inches more than normal. And it probably seems like more after last year when a paltry .93 inches of rain fell during the year’s sixth month, Minnesota Climatology Office data shows.

The least ever in June was .22 inches in 1988, the data shows.

Why so much this year?

Blame it on a warm front draped over the state, bottling up cooler weather to the north and steamy weather to the south and west. The colliding air masses put the squeeze on Minnesota, Assistant State Climatologist Pete Boulay said.

“It seemed that every weather system was passing over Minnesota,” he said. “We were locked in that weather pattern all of June, and that is a bulk of the issue. That triggers rounds of classic heavy rain.”

June’s deluge did catapult the Twin Cities way up the list of the wettest April, May and June periods going back to 1871. The metro area saw 17.27 inches of rain during those three months, making it the fourth wettest April-to-June of all time, the Climatology Office said.

Still ranking ahead of 2024 is the 17.88 inches that fell in that three-month run in 2001, the 18.89 inches from 1908 and the granddaddy of all, 22.18 in 2014, the Climatology Office said. The last time the Twin Cities had a single wetter month than this June was when 7.82 inches of rain fell in August 2016, Boulay said.

If there has been an upside to the incessant rain, the ever-flowing spigot has kept away the sizzling heat and humidity baking other parts of the country. As of Sunday, the daily average temperature in the Twin Cities in June has been 69.7 degrees, right on par with normal, the Climatology Office said.

The average high and low temperature for this time of the year is 82 and 64 respectively, according to the National Weather Service. Official thermometers have yet to record a 90-degree reading, though it was close at 89 degrees on June 16.

“When it is wet like this, it’s hard to get to 90 degrees,” Boulay said. Dry ground heats much more easily, he said.

It has been a decade since the Twin Cities has gone this late into summer without a 90-degree reading and without one in the month of June. Last year the metro saw 90 degrees or higher nine times in June. The most ever in June was 17 days in 1933, weather records show.

The rainy pattern looks to continue as the calendar turns to July. The National Weather Service is forecasting a 100% chance of rain Monday, with up to an inch of rain possible. Rain remains in the forecast every day this week, including the night of July 4th, which could wash out fireworks.

Will it break anytime soon? The Climate Prediction Center say Minnesota has equal chances of receiving normal amounts of precipitation during July, August and September, so maybe.

Rebecca Cunningham takes over as University of Minnesota president on Monday and almost immediately faces big decisions about how the U should run its medical programs and navigate tensions stemming from the war between Israel and Hamas.

Cunningham, a longtime emergency room physician, worked most recently as vice president of research and innovation at the University of Michigan, which reports one of the largest portfolios in the nation. In recent weeks, she has been attending Board of Regents meetings, scheduling introductions with Minnesota lawmakers and meeting with student groups making competing cases for whether the U should divest from Israel and how it should distinguish between free speech and hate speech.

“I’m so excited to be here,” Cunningham said. “What is actually happening on the ground is just tremendous, and I’ve been so impressed all along the way.”

Already her research background is being called upon. Two landmark U research papers — one focusing on Alzheimer’s disease and another on stem cells — were retracted over concerns about their integrity after researchers elsewhere struggled to duplicate their findings and raised questions about images within them.

The Star Tribune sat down with Cunningham last week to talk about her preparation and plans for tackling some of the most immediate challenges. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: It’s been a rough week for research at the U, with the news that two major papers were being retracted. What’s your analysis of the situation, and how will you prevent that from happening during your tenure?

A: I can speak in broader brushstrokes. Every major institution across the country right now has been facing this. I think it’s unfortunate when poor choices are made along the way that can impact the reputation both of research as a whole and cause concern for the public, when the vast majority of researchers are doing amazing research and are publishing with high integrity.

I dealt with this a lot last year, especially in papers from 20-plus years ago, when it maybe wasn’t quite so easy to spot all of these inconsistencies. I know that there has been a number of policies and procedures put in place here to try to do more education with faculty in the meantime to help them understand what it really means to alter a figure, and that that will be noticed.

To the prevention side: Faculty, unfortunately, are under a tremendous pressure to publish. And we have to work on the climate and support for them so that we they can focus on feeling good about the science they produced, even when it doesn’t produce the results they were hoping for — which is true science.

Q: Have you been involved in the discussions with Fairview Health Services over the future of the U’s teaching hospital? Are you expecting any big changes in trajectory?

A: I’ve been doing learning on the 20 years of detailed negotiations that have been going on, getting familiar with the current, public [letter of intent], have begun to meet the assorted players. That’s where we’re at for right now, and then it will certainly need to be a focus for these next couple of months. I think everyone wants to see that through, in the timeline it was envisioned.

Q: The university is still navigating tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas and the controversy over hiring a director for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Have you been consulting on those issues, and what’s your approach?

A: I’ve been updated on them. Obviously, academic freedom is critically important. I have not been involved in the decisionmaking to date. I did get to meet with both the Divest group and the group of Jewish students that [interim] President [Jeff] Ettinger had been meeting with. I think that they were great conversations, and I’m just proud to have students that are engaged and sitting down in this manner, really respectfully looking for collective solutions.

Obviously, we are bound by free speech. We’re a public university. However, we have to have a welcoming climate for all of our students and we have to be mindful of when that free speech transitions over into individual harassment. And, more than that, whatever we can do to help our students also just be mindful of how they’re coming off to each other … whatever we can do to help our students work toward feeling inclusiveness, even when they disagree, is going to be critical.

A magnetic therapy for persistent depression is in such demand in the Twin Cities that Allina Health has doubled its capacity with the opening of a new mental health center in Fridley.

While antidepressant medications and talk therapy are still the first options, Allina psychiatrist Dr. Bennett Poss said alternatives are needed for the growing share of patients who aren’t helped by those treatments alone. Transcranial magnetic stimulation has been an option in the U.S. for 15 years, but it emerged in the post-pandemic era as more people sought depression treatment and more research validated its potential.

“Evidence-wise, it’s one of those things that has actually panned out better or at least as advertised,” said Poss, who provides TMS at Allina’s Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. “There are so many things that look good in clinical trials and then they make it to patient care and they’re not so good.”

TMS involves magnetic coils that are placed on the scalp for around 30 minutes and direct pulses into the brain, usually at a golf-ball-sized target on the front left side that regulates mood. After one to two months of five-day-a-week treatments, about half of patients report some benefit and a third see remission of depressive symptoms, studies have shown.

Poss likened it to lifting weights or running, and he said that it stimulates a part of the brain that is underutilized in people with depression.

“We put it into use more than you would otherwise, and over time it causes some of the same changes you would actually see with exercise” to the body, he said.

More than 23% of Minnesota adults reported in 2022 that they had depression at some point, an increase from 15% in 2011, according to survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Minnesota in that timespan went from below the national average to at or slightly above it.

TMS is only recommended for a fraction of those patients who have been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, which is marked by severe and prolonged sadness and hopelessness. But clinicians said that is being diagnosed more as well.

“The cool thing about (TMS) is once people have received the treatment, and if they respond to it, they don’t have to continue it, necessarily. So it’s distinct in some ways from medication,” said Dr. Sophia Albott, who heads the University of Minnesota’s division of adult mental health.

The treatment has roots at the U, where Dr. Ziad Nahas was involved in clinical trials that persuaded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve it in 2008 as a treatment for major depression in adults.

Albott said the magnetic therapy was originally limited to patients who had tried therapy and had no success, or had severe side effects, with at least four antidepressant drugs. The federal Medicare program recently expanded its coverage so that patients only had to try two drugs before being eligible for TMS, which partly explains the recent growth in Minnesota.

Coverage in Minnesota varies by insurance plan and employer. HealthPartners generally uses prior authorization in its plans to make sure patients have tried other treatments first, but Medica does not use that restriction.

Albott said she hopes it becomes more of a first-line therapy, though its time commitment will remain a barrier along with the roughly $10,000 cost shared between patients and insurers. Recent U research has tried to predict which patients respond best to TMS, whether it substantially increases interest in daily life and reduces suicidal impulses, and whether it can be expanded for use by adolescents and for neurological conditions such as stroke.

The treatment already has been approved for smoking and obsessive compulsive disorder, and some researchers believe it can treat the ear-ringing condition known as tinnitus, which also reportedly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Becky Steffens, 39, of Coon Rapids, didn’t believe it would work, not after 15 years of dealing with depressive symptoms. Success at the U’s clinic for treatment-resistant depression came when her doctors switched sides and directed magnetic pulses into the right side of her brain. Research has found that some patients need stimulation on that side to regulate a different portion of the brain that fuels negative thoughts.

Treatment wasn’t easy because it disrupted work, was noisy and uncomfortable, she said. “It’s like a little bird is pecking on the same spot on your head over and over for like 50 minutes.”

It also wasn’t one-and-done success, as she needed two rounds and once-a-week maintenance treatments along with other depression therapies. But TMS gave Steffens several months of complete remission and reduced symptoms the rest of the time that allowed her to discover joys in life such as painting and volunteering.

“I’m able to have a baseline where I’m not necessarily, like, happy and joyful and everything is great,” she said, “but I’m not sad and stuck. I feel like it’s kind of a place where I’m able to have emotions, feel them and then come back to a baseline … and not get stuck in those negative sticky thoughts.”

Poss said there will be need for other treatments, including more extreme but highly effective electroconvulsive therapy that causes patients to go into seizures and “resets” their brains without depressive symptoms. But he said he is particularly optimistic about TMS now that it is gaining interest and access is expanding at Allina’s Mercy Hospital Campus in Fridley.