I don’t have to tell you that the temperature has been riding a roller coaster for the past several weeks. It’s that crazy time of year where we could have all four seasons in one day, and we’ve kind of seen that. Climatologist Corey Davis from the State Climate Office of North Carolina, what’s your perspective?
It’s definitely felt like if you go back to the end of October, we had high temperatures up in the mid 80s. Definitely more summer like them fall like for that stretch of the year. You’re right. It seems like we’ve tried to fit all four seasons in just over the last two or three weeks.
We’re seeing even more degradation now on the Drought Monitor. Tell us what you’re seeing.
So we did have a little bit of rain last weekend, mainly farther south across South Carolina from around Augusta, Georgia up through the Myrtle Beach area. We are still seeing wildfire activity down in the southern mountains in North Carolina. Fortunately, the little bit of rain and especially some of the cooler temperatures and follow up that they had last weekend did at least help with containing some of those fires. The big one out in Cherokee County has burned about 5000 acres, but it went from only around 5% contained up to now and closer to 80% contained. So we’re thankful for the little bit of rain that we did have but again, just those fairly light amounts means that we’re not seeing any improvements on the drought map just yet.
I see a chance of some showers this weekend. Is that really going to bring any help?
Well, it really will just be a chance and they will only be scattered showers this weekend. But the system I’m watching more closely now it looks like it’ll come in on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. It’ll be a pretty strong cold front coming in from the west and unlike a lot of the fronts that we see this time of the year there will be a decent amount of moisture with this system. So everything holds together like the models are showing right now. We can pick up the first significant rainfall in almost two months. In some areas. Totals look like they can range from around half an inch upwards of two inches, maybe even more than that in some spots. So this would not be a drought Buster in the sense that it would not get rid of those deficits that we built up over the last couple of months. But it could go a long way in at least alleviating some of the impacts that we’ve been feeling lately.