The rain the past few days, boy, now that has been something we haven’t seen a lot of recently, and the Drought Monitor reflects that. Any change in that Drought Monitor? Well, we’ll ask Corey Davis about that. He is the Assistant State Climatologist for North Carolina, and man, I tell you, I got a lot at my house. I don’t know about yours and elsewhere, but we had several rainy days earlier this week.

“Yeah, Mike, it was not one, but two separate rain events earlier this week. One of those, mainly on Monday into Tuesday morning, the other more Tuesday night and especially during the day on Wednesday, as we had a pretty strong cold front, move across the Carolinas. Like you said, the US Drought Monitor map this week has some changes, but really no improvements across the Carolinas. We actually even had a little bit of degradation across South Carolina at some of the spots that did not see as much rain. So you may look at that map and wonder, what gives? Why aren’t we seeing those improvements? And the reason is that the drought assessment is based on data through Tuesday morning, and at that point, we hadn’t seen the heaviest rain move in yet. The Weekly totals were mainly a half an inch or so across central North Carolina, getting into the midlands of South Carolina, and really less than a quarter inch right along the coast in North and South Carolina. So that was not enough to move the needle, so to speak, on the drought map, but we did have heavier rain move in again later Tuesday into Wednesday. Some parts of western North Carolina had almost three inches from that event. From the triangle north to the Virginia border, we had two to three inches. And then parts of central and northeastern North Carolina had well over an inch just during the day on Wednesday. So that does give us hope that we will see some improvements on the drought map by this time next week.”

If you had to make an educated guess right now, how much improvement do you anticipate?

“Well, we’ve got pretty widespread moderate drought across North Carolina. Almost 88% of the state is in moderate drought now. So I think it’s pretty safe to say, especially in parts of the northern and central mountains that has some of those higher weekly totals, they will probably go out of moderate drought, back to just the abnormally dry range. And then also some parts of the Piedmont and northern coastal plain should see some improvements as well. So I think we will definitely cut back on the moderate drought, but there will still be some drought on the map next week, and that’s especially true down along the coast in South Carolina, those areas just did not see as much rain during both events this week, less than half an inch in total for the week there. So we also see that reflected on some of the recent rainfall deficits. If we go back to the middle of October. Over the last couple months, places like Wilmington and Myrtle Beach still running about five inches below their normal rainfall, so those areas will probably stay in moderate drought.”