We are at the halfway point of climatological winter, and I think that might be a good time to take a look back on what has looked like a fairly warm and wet season, but I’m gonna get the expert’s opinion right now and to turn to Assistant State Climatologist Corey Davis from the State Climate Office of North Carolina. What say ye, Corey?

You know we’re coming up on conference championship weekend for the NFL so kind of a good time to look at the winter in football terms. We did get a nice break from the rain over the last week. We saw some starting back up just yesterday, but just having those few days without any precipitation was really nice for the farmers. gave them a chance to get out in the field for the first time all season. We also heard from some folks that are beginning to do some prescribed burning. Usually this is not a time of year we see a lot of that but because it was so dry in the fall, they really didn’t have many opportunities then so just finding a few not soaking wet days in the wintertime sometimes can work pretty well.

Taking this halftime break right now, let’s put on our analyst’s hat on, just like they’re going to do on TV this weekend, and let’s predict what’s going to be different moving forward in the second half.

Well Jim Nance, I’ll put on my best at Tony Romo impression here. You know sometimes when we see even in a football game, a lot of the same thing happened in the first half. You’ll see something different to start the second half and I think in terms of the overall patterns, we are getting back into that wet pattern. We’ve seen the rain beginning to move in as of yesterday. still expecting some on and off showers today but especially as we move into Saturday, Saturday night and first thing Sunday morning, it looks like that’ll be our next best chance for some steady and at times heavy rainfall. The further north and west you go we’re expecting the totals will increase, and some areas could end up seeing two to three inches of rain out of this entire week. So in that sense, it’s going to look a lot like it did back in December, back in the first part of January. Just a solid soaking rain event on through the weekend.

Climatologist Corey Davis, you have yourself a great weekend in front of the tube pulling for your favorite NFL team if indeed they are still hanging around. Mine is not. We’ll talk to you next week. All right. Thanks a lot, Mike.