The latest drought monitor came out on Thursday morning, and hurricane Irene, for the most part has pulled North Carolina and Virginia out of drought. Mike Moneypenny, Hydrologist for the National Weather Service says that many parts of the Carolinas were indeed left wanting:
“We saw a lot of real good improvement in our stream flows, unfortunately though across central North Carolina down into South Carolina we avoided the brunt of Irene’s rainfall. We didn’t see a whole lot of improvement across the central part of the state.”
And of course, South Carolina saw almost no benefits from Irene, and the state remains in moderate to severe drought:
“Irene helped it almost none at all, since Irene came in at Cape Lookout. And the rainfall was pretty much straight from Wilmington, North Carolina up across eastern Virginia and up into the northeast. So, South Carolina really... just the northern coastal region benefited much from Irene at all.”
While the drought maps in North Carolina and Virginia look good for now, and there has been steady rainfall in the month since Hurricane Irene, Moneypenny says now is not the time to breathe a sigh of relief:
“When you’re in a drought of the areal size and the magnitude from Texas all the way through the southeast up into the Carolinas, these afternoon thundershowers just don’t cut it, they’ll just provide short-term relief in small areas. So, it gets back to an old hydrologist saying that to end a drought you need a flood. We came pretty close during Irene but we do really need a tropical system to come out of the Gulf and slow down and provide us some long-term widespread rainfall.”
It’s recently been announced that for the second year in a row, a La Nina has set up in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. This news could possibly spell disaster for the southern plains and eastward to the coast. Moneypenny explains what a La Nina will mean for the Carolina's come winter:
“La Nina, of course, mainly a concern for us, it’s a climatological signal that we look for in the winter time months, and we did a couple of good months of rainfall but the effect that we normally expect to see in the southeast which pretty much tapers off when you get north of North Carolina is for a warmer, dryer winter.”
National Weather Service Hydrologist, Mike Moneypenny
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