Talking with Assistant State Climatologist Corey Davis from the State Climate Office of North Carolina, and Corey we could wrap up the past week in one word, rain.
“Yeah, I think rain, wet, torrential, any of those would be some pretty good adjectives for this past week, we previewed this in the forecast. Last week, we talked about some pretty good chances of rain, especially over the weekend, and boy, did they pan out. We saw the first one of those last Friday.”
You’re just bragging now, aren’t you? Yeah, I know you called for rain. Yeah, you got it right!
“You know this. This was a setup that, if you looked at some of the forecast, they were comparing this to an atmospheric river type event, where we’re just getting this nonstop feed of moisture off the Atlantic. Again, the first one of those events was early last weekend. There was another round of that by Monday, especially Monday night into Tuesday. And altogether, some of the totals from this week’s worth of rain are similar to what we might see from a tropical storm across North and South Carolina, widespread totals of more than two inches. And then in some of the wetter spots, parts of the mountains in North Carolina, in some areas right along the coastline, more than five inches for the past week. This was the wettest period we’ve had in some of those areas since Hurricane Helene came through last fall. So that shows you how long we’ve been waiting for a good, solid rain event like this, and especially down at the coast, where they had had some of those severe drought conditions in place now for several months, this was the relief that they had been looking for get around Jacksonville, some areas had seven to eight inches of rain, so especially some of those lingering hot spots where they had some wildfires burning this spring, that rain went a long way taking care of those, again, lingering hot spots and smoldering fires.”
So did this rain event pretty much wipe out any deficits that we had in the Carolinas?
“Yeah, except for a few areas, we are now at least near normal without on a surplus in terms of precipitation for the spring. If we go back to the beginning of March and again, we’re only a couple weeks away from the end of climatological spring. Now we can see that we’re now above normal in places like Raleigh and Lumberton. You look along the coast, this is the most surprising part. Some of these areas, like Wilmington, had been two and a half to three inches below normal for the spring. So far, we’ve talked about it seems like every week they were only getting maybe half an inch, they were falling further and further below normal. But with the four inches that Wilmington got last week, they’re now running a little bit above normal for the season. And if you look down in Columbia, South Carolina, they had also been in a deficit just a couple weeks ago. They’re now more than five inches above their normal rainfall for the spring, on pace for one of the wetter springs on record down there. So just goes to show, it only takes that one event to turn things around. We do have a few spots that are still running a little bit below normal. These are places where that rain was not all that long lasting. Earlier this week, up in the northeastern corner of North Carolina, Elizabeth City is about two and a half inches below normal. So again, we’re still seeing some drought conditions lingering in that area, but the rain that we saw earlier this week really wiped drought off the map across most of the Carolinas.”
Elizabeth City is always below normal. I know. I don’t care what happens, they’re just dry up there. What brought about this? This change. We had been dry for so long and all of a sudden, boom. Can you help shed some light on that in layman’s terms?
“Yeah, I think part of this was that La Nina pattern that we had been in since the fall and over the winter. Finally, during those La Nina type events, we tend to see the jet streams and the storm track shift to our north, if we look back, especially over the winter months, we just weren’t seeing very frequent weather systems moving through. And the ones that did just did not have a lot of moisture with them, because they were not tapping into those sources of moisture off to our south and east, but that La Nina is officially gone. Now we have reset that large scale pattern, and that means that we are able to get more of these storms tracking through the Carolinas, and as we’ve seen over the past week, right along the coast, that’s the ideal setup for pulling in all that moisture from the south and from the east. So again, we can think that departure of La Nina, but also we’ve seen pretty much every day over the past week, those spring like showers and storms. It’s hot, it’s humid. We’re going to see those showers and storms pretty much every day, and we’ve seen some pretty heavy totals also on a daily basis from those events.”
Well, you’ve already given us a teaser there with La Nina out of the way, what does our forecast look like?
“Well, it is going to look and feel like summer here over the next couple of days, highs in the mid to low 90s this afternoon, mostly upper 80s to low 90s on Saturday, as we’ll see a little bit more cloud cover, and then by Saturday night, we’ll have our next cold front coming through that will bring another small chance of showers and thunderstorms by Saturday night, but it’ll also knock our temperatures back five degrees or so. We’ll be in the mid to upper 80s by Sunday, and then through the first part of next week, it’ll be pretty seasonable, mostly mid-80s. Pretty typical for this time of the year. We don’t see anywhere near those same rain chances that we had over the last week. So I think for the farmers out there, they’ll probably be pretty happy with the forecast, and also pretty happy with the rain that they’ve gotten. Over the past week, we have seen a nice surge in the crop progress. The planting for things like cotton and peanuts and soybeans has all progressed pretty well. And then also, we’re seeing that corn is in really good shape. Heard some reports for places down like Sampson County in eastern North Carolina, they say this is looking like a banner year for the corn crop so far, and certainly we have that recent rain to thank for a lot of that.”
Absolutely. And I got to tell you, my granddaughter has a soccer game on Saturday, so I hear that it’s going to be near 90 or so degrees. What about the humidity?
“So this is the very summerlike pattern that we get used to as we head into the month of June. Here it comes, muggy with that chance of storms. You may see those billowing clouds off in the distance. So I would say I definitely be prepared to hydrate during the afternoon on Saturday, and certainly be prepared to take shelter if one of those storms moves overhead.“