Rain Mostly a Bust
Well, it looks like those predictions for all that rain this week didn’t exactly come true. Despite predictions of one to two inches made as late as Monday, most of the Atlanta area received less than an inch of rain from the storm.
The official rain gauge in Atlanta recorded .53 inches of precipitation as of 8 this morning. Other locations include Chamblee with .28 inches, Marietta with .24 inches, Macon with .69 inches and Athens with .35 inches. Isolated areas got soaked, though. Brunswick reported 1.6 inches, Cordele had an inch and a half, Plains had 2.37 inches and it looks like West Point got the day’s highest rainfall, with 2.97 inches. However, a few miles away in Columbus, then had .7 inches, so the possibility of ‘isolated heavy rainfall’ did come true in a few locations.
I guess you could say that in the battle of pressures, the high pressure won out. The dry air and the very nice weather we had over the weekend had to be forced out in order to get the moist rain producing tropical air into the northern half of the state. As late as 4 PM, the dew point hadn’t gone above 60, and we had a case of cold air damming–unusual in the summer–where the high pressure was being forced up against the mountains, giving the low pressure nowhere to go.
All of this could result in another typical winter phenomenon, a Nor’Easter running up the Atlantic coast, bringing heavy precipitation to the mid-Atlantic and New England. The low will seek its escape out into the Atlantic and keep moving north, bringing unneeded rain to the northeast. Between the CAD (which because it was summer, wasn’t really that cold) and the Nor’Easter, this storm was more typical of what you would see in the winter, instead of the middle of August.
Of course, Fall is rapidly approaching. We’ve finally started lowering both the daily average high and low temperatures, and we’ve lost almost an hour of daylight since the beginning of summer two months ago. Due to the drought the leaves on my trees are dropping, making it look more like mid-October than mid-August, but that’s not due to the cooler weather.
The best hope for drought relief remains tropical weather, and it looks like we may see some activity beginnining this weekend. A tropical wave east of Cuba is drawing attention, and could develop into a tropical storm by the weekend. Some models have it crossing Florida into the gulf, while others keep it along the Atlantic. The northeast quadrant of a storm is the one that tends to get the most rain, so for really beneficial rainfall in north Georgia, we really need to see something come from the gulf, rather than from the Atlantic. If this wave doesn’t do the trick, however, there will likely be others behind it.
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