Outside of a few stormy days here and there, we’ve been starting to lean in a drier direction for the past several weeks. Rainfall estimates for the past two weeks do have a widespread 1.5″ to 3″ range across a large part of the area, and a few communities with instances of training storms have gotten as much as 4 to 6″ of rain. However, when we add the drier couple of weeks that came before that, much of the area has seen only around half or a little more of their normal rainfall for the past 30 days. A few locations have only gotten a third to a quarter of what is normal for that period. That has led to the development of at least short-term “abnormally dry” conditions across pretty much all of the area, and even a few spots of low-end “moderate” drought here and there, especially in Maury and Hardin Counties of Tennessee in our viewing area.
The good news is that the well-above average rainfall from the first half of the year has made it so that we still aren’t running behind on year-to-date rainfall despite the recent shift to drier weather. Most of southern Tennessee has still come in around normal for rainfall from the past 365 days, and that includes the drought period this time last late summer and into fall… and north Alabama still is coming in slightly above average. While there are still some rainfall deficits in southern Tennessee and near I-65 in north Alabama, they are less than half of what they were at this same time on the calendar last year. And as an example of how okay we’re still doing for long-term rainfall, the Muscle Shoals airport is still a foot above normal in terms of year-to-date rainfall amounts. That means that deep-layer water tables, long-term lake levels, etc., are still okay for now…. and will probably be okay or near okay as we head into September and October, two months that are usually our driest here in the Tennessee Valley.
Additional good news is that even though we’re fairly dry right now and have very limited rain chances in the forecast for the next week, extended range precipitation outlooks from the NWS Climate Prediction Center do suggest we’ll start leaning back into at least slightly above average precipitation chances as we head into the first 10 days of September. We may not have absolute gully washers on the horizon, but it does start to look like we’ll begin to pick up a bit more moisture going forward in what is often times the driest part of the year!
