Fay Brings Welcome Rainfall, With Maybe More to Come
It looks like the worst of Fay has finally left north Georgia, although some counties to the east of Atlanta are having tornado warnings, the tornado watch was just extended until 2 AM Wednesday for much of northeast Georgia and South Carolina, and a flash flood watch remains in effect until 8 PM. We may get a few more showers overnight, but there are bits of blue skies showing. Fay is becoming extratropical, and will move northeast to bother the mid Atlantic states for the next day or so.
Let’s take a look at some of what Fay has done. First of all, Lake Lanier has risen about six inches as of noontime today from where it was early Monday morning. Much of the Lake Lanier watershed received some good rainfall over the past day or two, including Gainesville, with 2.64 inches so far today and .73 inches yesterday and Helen with 4.01 inches over the past two days. I expect Lanier to continue to rise over the next few days as much of the runoff from the storm continues to flow into the lake.
With 2.07 inches of rain today and .99 inches on Monday evening and Tuesday, I’ve recorded 48 hour precipitation of 3.06 inches at my weather station. Today’s rain here is the most in one calendar day since November 15, 2006, when 2.19 inches of rain fell, and as best as I can tell is the most 2 day precipitation since Tropical Storm Cindy came through on July 6-7, 2005, leaving 4.62 inches of rainfall.
My station, which is obviously not official, is on the low end of the rainfall scale. Some other two day rainfall totals include Alpharetta with 5.39 inches, Atlanta Hartsfield with 3.09 inches, Cleveland with 5.14 inches, Cumming with 4.52 inches and Cedartown, with 2.87 inches. It looks like Thomasville, Georgia is going to have the most rainfall from Fay–even beating anywhere in Florida–with a whopping 27.5 inches total precipitation through 2 PM today.
So does this mean the drought is over? Not exactly. For many areas, the rains from Fay only brought the rainfall total up to normal for August, given the extremely dry first few weeks of the month. And, Lake Lanier is well below where it should be, even this late in the summer. The good news/bad news is that after Fay, we now have to pay attention to Gustav, which is likely to turn into a much more powerful storm, and two more tropical waves which are likely to turn into storms prior to Labor Day.
Gustav is predicted to be a category 3 hurricane by Sunday afternoon, located a few hundred miles south of New Orleans. Right now, he’s made landfall in Haiti, and will be moving west south of Cuba, emerging into the Gulf by Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile, the Hurricane center is looking seriously at another low pressure system to the west of the Windward Islands that is expected to develop into a storm, and yet another one off the coast of Africa that has the potential to develop.
These storms are jockeying for position around high pressure located over the Florida peninsula. While it’s too early to tell for sure, chances are that Gustav will hit somewhere on the Gulf coast, and could affect the Atlanta area by this time next week. The wave off the Windward islands, assuming it develops, would more likely be slamming the Atlantic coast somewhere north of Georgia, and wouldn’t have an effect here.
In the short term, all the moist tropical air brought into the area by Fay isn’t going to go anywhere too soon. With the lack of a front to chase the humid air away, we’ve got a chance of thunderstorms through Labor Day weekend. At least you won’t have to worry about watering your landscape, at least for a little while.
Update 10:30 PM: Lake Lanier is now reporting 1054.56 inches - more than a foot above where it was yesterday morning.
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