Rain Coming To Vermont; Not Nearly Enough

Rainfall in northern New England has been running two to 
as much as four inches below normal over 
the past 30 days, NOAA image.

 The dry and drought conditions continue to deepen, especially in northern Vermont and New Hampshire and interior Maine.  

Wet weather keeps passing by to our south, leaving places like southern New England OK, and parts of the Mid-Atlantic states with too much of a good thing with flooding going on there in the past week. 

With fingers crossed, rain appears to be heading our way - we think.  Even if the forecasts turn out to be accurate, this will be far too little of a good thing. But we'll take anything we can get.

As I mentioned yesterday, this weather pattern can surprise.  We could get a little more, or more likely a little less rain than forecast and the timing of the predictions could be off.  But at this point it looks like even northern areas, which keep missing out on rain, could get a half inch of precipitation or so between late tonight and Tuesday. 

That's not a huge amount of rain, but it's a brief stopgap to briefly stop things from getting worse. 

Rainfall in a band across northern New York, from Route 4 north in Vermont, northern New Hampshire and most of Maine has been two to as much as four inches below normal over the past 30 days.  That's on top of a dry spring. 

Drought conditions are expanding in Vermont, except the far south. The percentage of the state that was in moderate drought went from 28 percent to 42 percent last week. The parts of central and northern Vermont that weren't in drought were still abnormally dry.

This dryness has become a new pattern, as it's been pretty parched off and on around here since the spring of 2018.  We have periods in between when it's been wetter (most notably around the floods of Halloween, 2019), but rainfall has otherwise been kind of sluggish for three years now.

Of course, it's impossible to tell when we'll finally fall into wetter weather to recharge wells and such. As a rule of thumb, most summers, you want an inch of rain per week. This summer from now on, we'd probably want two inches per week. I doubt we'll get that. 

Short term, after the rains early this week, it will pretty much dry out again by Wednesday.  Another chance of showers will probably come in next Saturday, but so far, I'm unimpressed by how decent those additional rains might be.