No Drought In Vermont So Far, Which Is A Nice Change Of Pace

Rain pouring down on flowers and wisteria on my back
deck this morning. For the first spring since 2017, I havent't
had any trouble with too dry gardens.

 We've had some showers around my hacienda in St. Albans, Vermont once again.  I've hardly had to water any of the gardens in weeks now, which is great. I can focus on other tasks. 

I write this to discuss a type of weather that can crop up this time of year, opposite of the flash flood risks I talked about yesterday.

And that type of weather is drought. Knock on wood, this is the first time since 2017 we didn't have to deal with dry conditions anywhere in Vermont this time of year.

Abnormally dry conditions in parts of Vermont  have come and gone, but have been on the persistent side since late summer and fall of 2017.

However, for the past month-ish or so, the U.S. Drought Monitor has not depicted in their weekly reports any dry spots in Vermont. Some lingering abnormally dry conditions - a little short of a drought - lingered in northeastern Vermont into May, but that has since gone away. 

There's no telling how the rest of the summer will go of course. (We had nearly double the normal rainfall for the month in June, 2017 only to see things gradually dry out in the late summer and fall, to the point where a few forest fires broke out in October). 

So far, so good this year, though. Drought continues to linger in western Maine. Some drought conditions have developed in parts of southern and eastern New England. 

Unlike in recent years, when southern Vermont got all the water and the north missed out, southern parts of the Green Mountain State are a little on the dry side, though not in drought.

U.S. Drought Monitor is seeing no trouble
with dry conditions in Vermont. Southeastern
New England and western Maine are on 
the dry side, though. 

Aside from an arid 10-day stretch in mid-May,  we've had a Goldilocks rainfall pattern this spring and now early summer in northern Vermont. 

It's certainly wet enough, but not so wet that we're in a swamp or dealing with floods. Rain seems to come every other day. Nothing especially heavy, but enough to keep things nice and damp and green and growing.  

Keep it coming!

Of course, as noted, we don't know what the coming months will bring. Short term looks good. First of all, we're not in any kind of weather pattern that would bring excessively hot weather. Which is good. Hot weather dries things out pretty quickly.

And, cold fronts and little storms continue to zip on through every few days. It's raining as I write this at 6:45 a.m. Friday in St. Albans.  This just about 24 hours after another decent soaking. 

Rain tends to be hit and miss in the summer, but we do have shower chances today, perhaps a few widely scattered ones Saturday, and a decent chance of showers and perhaps storms late Monday and Tuesday.

Longer range forecasts through June 16 seem to want to keep our temperatures near normal, with a possible tendency to be a little wetter than average.