After two weeks without rain in central and southern Gwinnett county, rain finally came on Wednesday evening. I recorded 1.1 inches Wednesday night, and another .22 inches today. This is the first time since back on March 19th that we’ve gotten more than an inch of rainfall in a single day.

While the plants certainly appear to be enjoying the water, I was a little surprised at how little even that much rain has affected soil moisture. As you know, I have a soil moisture meter buried in the back yard about a foot below the ground. The values it reports ‘work in reverse’, in that the lower the number reported by the gauge, the wetter the soil. It only measures up to a value of 100 — I guess when it gets that high, things are pretty dire, and you need to provide water. Also, for technical reasons, if it gets to 100 and I restart the computer, it will show a value of 0.

Anyway for the last week or so, the gauge has been pegged at the maximum 100 value. After last night’s rainfall, the value dropped to 24, which would indicate about ‘normal’ to slightly wet soil moisture. As of now, and even with today’s rainfall, the gauge is back up to 57, which would be very dry.

So while the rain has provided some welcome short-term relief, we need a lot more to get back to a reasonable moisture profile, much less end the drought. The latest Georgia drought monitor doesn’t show much of a change from last week. Gwinnett County and all of northeast Georgia remain in an extreme drought situation. We’re still in better shape than we were at this time last year, with only 15% of the state in extreme drought compared to 45% last year.

The good news is that we’re in a weather pattern for the next week or so that is likely to continue to bring rainfall. There’s a stalled trough that extends through Georgia from a low located on the South Carolina-North Carolina border that makes conditions ripe for thunderstorms. That’s likely to stick around for the first part of the weekend, until the front moves out. There are continued chances for rain from the middle to the end of next week.

Unfortunately, any hopes we had for tropical relief from Bertha appear to have gone out the window, as Bertha is forecast to recurve north and miss the US entirely. While Bertha became one of the most powerful hurricanes seen in July, we’re not likely to see a chance of meaningful tropical weather until the middle of August, when the heart of the hurricane season starts.

Sphere: Related Content

Posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Categories: Drought.
Tags: Bertha, Rainfall.
RSS 2.0 Comments Feed  •  Leave a Response  •  Trackback