Drought Developing Across the Region

By now, many of you have likely sat down in the morning, read through our forecast posts and come across a line that goes something like, “This weather pattern has been ridiculously boring“, or “Well, we’re looking at another rainless day..“, etc. We have not seen a solid, steady rainfall in what feels like a million years.

Well, we are now feeling the after affects of this issue. After having a fairly wet summer, the region has quickly moved into a moderate drought.

Just this time in August, 100% of the state was seeing normal, drought-less conditions. Now we are seeing 82% of the state in a moderate drought. We went into September with a surplus of precipitation measuring around 4.36″. You would anticipate this being enough, on average, to take us through the end of the year with just average precipitation. But at this point, it has essentially stopped raining.

Since the beginning of September, we are 5.18″ of rain below normal. We are waaaaay behind in the budget for our rainfall. A lot of this has to do with the pattern that we have been seeing over the past couple of months. We’ve consistently been seeing anomalous ridging after anomalous ridging, which shunts much of the precipitation chances well to our north. When we haven’t seen that, we get low pressure systems that move to our northeast and drag weak, moisture starved cold fronts through the region. Today is a perfect example.

A low pressure system developed, and moved northeastward. However, the cold front associated with it is weakly forced and isn’t associated with deep moisture. That is a combination that won’t create heavy precipitation very often. We are starting to get into the range of, “We need rain badly”, so hopefully the next few weeks get a bit more active, and not just so our forecasts are interesting again.