Attempts At A Little Drought Relief In Vermont, But Some Of It Falls Short

Droughts tend to be self-perpetuating, and we see that in what's going on in Vermont now. 

A nice amount of water in my St. Albans, Vermont rain
gauge this morning from last night's weather front,
but most of Vermont missed out again. The drought
will not go away anytime soon, even where 
there were a few downpours last night. 

A wet weather front approached us Thursday and Thursday night from New York and actually held together enough to give a corner of northwest Vermont a decent soaking.  

It still had enough oomph left to deposit a healthy 1.16 inches of rain in Burlington and a glorious 1.3 inches here in St. Albans. So not bad! Not enough to end the drought, but it did wet us down a bit

As the front moved further eastward into Vermont in continued to run into a buzzsaw of dry air over the dusty Green Mountain State .  The rains quickly evaporated.  

Part of the problem was the front was just running out of gas and the contrast in temperatures in front of and behind it fell apart. That helped reduce the amount of rising air that manufactures rain. Plus, the sun had set, so the instability in the air was waning, which reduced the amount of rainfall. 

If the air had been more humid before last night's weather system got here, the rain might have held together longer and covered more of Vermont.  And had the ground been wetter instead of parched that would have translated a little humidity to the air to help with process of making rain. 

 Most of eastern and southern Vermont, which needed the rain even more than areas west of the Greens, only received a few hundredths of an inch of rain last night.  Not really even enough to get things vaguely wet.

We do have another shot at receiving rain, but it will be no drought buster. 

Before we get there, we have another dry, sunny day to get through. The clouds were clearing this morning. Though the air won't be as arid as it was Thursday, the sunshine and breezes should resume the drying process in northwest Vermont and continue it in the east. 

The forecast has been consisted for a second cold front to drop a decent amount of rain tomorrow. Let's hope that forecast holds up. 

Even better, if the predictions are correct,   this next round of rain tomorrow will hit eastern Vermont the hardest. Still, those areas should receive only a half inch to at most an inch of rain.  Northwest Vermont should receive an additional third to a half inch of rain Saturday. 

Saturday's rains will help somewhat, as it will be a steady soaker,  But you need several of those for the rest of the fall, and so far, that doesn't look like it's in the cards. 

Next week looks dry once again, with only scattered light showers or sprinkles at most. The weather pattern through mid-September and probably well beyond that features a series of big fat, dry, slow moving high pressure systems coming from Canada.  

That means cool outbreaks, then warm ups as the sunny highs with low humidity sit right over us for a few days, sucking away what little moisture we have left. Then, new cold fronts with new outbreaks of chilly, dry air come in, rinse and repeat.

Except there's no rinse. The cold fronts that will introduce each new dry high pressure system will probably be moisture-starved, and provide very little wetting. That's very bad news. 

DROUGHT IN PERSPECTIVE

The gold standard for measuring droughts is the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor, which has been in operation since 2000.

According to the Drought Monitor data, our current Vermont drought is the most intense since at least 2000.  I remember a similar drought in the late summer of 1999, but it wasn't as bad as this, and ended abruptly with a very wet September. Which won't happen this year. 

Vermont faced persistent drought in the 1960s, but it was a sort of long lasting, low-key affair in which precipitation was mostly below normal, but it never really entirely shut off, like it did this August. Back then, we had problems with dry wells, and iffy crop yields, but the trees weren't turning brown in the middle of August like they did this year. 

There was also a spring drought way back in 1903, when Burlington got only 1.63 inches of rain in April, and just a trace in May, which is the driest month on record. But the summer of 1903 was wet, so that drought eased. 

It's going to take a lot to get out of this one. Vermont State Climatologist Lesley-Ann Duping-Giroux was quoted by VTDigger than the state needs six to eight inches of rain throughout a month to pull itself out of this drought. And the rain would need to keep coming after that, 

We're going to need a lot of wet nor'easters, stalled weather fronts and other inclement weather later this fall, through the winter and next spring to recover from this.  

Vermont is already feeling the economic effects of this drought. Farmers are running out of water for livestock.  They have to buy expensive feed because they're not growing enough of their own because the drought stunted yields. 

The drought might dull Vermont's famed foliage season, which could cut into the revenue we get from the annual influx of leaf peepers. 

If this keeps up, the ski industry might be in trouble, since resorts use a lot of water to make snow. 

It's hard to pin a drought like this directly to climate change, but it's consistent with it.  With climate change, there's a lot of weather whiplash -  everybody goes from one extreme to another.  The summers of 2023 and 2024 in Vermont were disastrously wet, with extreme flooding and destruction. 

Suddenly this year, the rivers are dry, the lawns are brown and the wells are empty. The only consistent thing between these summers is it was unusually hot. 

The hot weather patterns of 2023 and 2024 were accompanied by high humidity and plenty of storm systems to wring out that excess moisture into flooding rain. The warmth and heat of 2025 has often been dry, and there's been precious few storms to wring out any water in the air to give us rain.