It's Been Rather Dry Just West Of Us

Despite last night's half inch of rain at the Airport, many areas to the city's north and west missed out on thunderstorm activity and continue to sit in the midst of what is becoming a pretty significant dry spell in South Central through Western Pennsylvania.   Most of last night's heavy thunderstorm activity hit South Jersey, which could also use the rain but has been a bit luckier in the rainfall department this summer than those of us to the northwest of I-95.    Most places locally are running not just weekly deficits in the rainfall bucket...but are now approaching three to four month rainfall deficits.

Just in the last 60 days parts of Chester, Berks, and Lancaster County are running rainfall deficits of over four and a half inches.  Those deficits are also occurring down in Sussex County in Delaware, with deficits as high as six inches to the north of Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania.   The region itself needs about an inch of rain per week, give or take, to simply maintain "average" rainfall.   While average typically doesn't happen and rainfall in the summer can easily fall into the feast or famine department, with little separating the two, the lack of rain in parts of our area is starting become a bit of a crop issue.

While we're not technically in a drought in the region, we are entering a pretty prolonged dry spell in parts of the area which is starting to show up in drought reports, particularly for Western Pennsylvania and also Delaware as of last week's drought report.   The newest drought report will come out tomorrow morning, likely expanding some of the abnormally dry zones in Pennsylvania and probably introducing some abnormally dry conditions to parts of our area.  Even in Philadelphia, which has been hit with some significant thunderstorm events since June 1st (June 16th, July 8th, and last night to name three), the Airport's observation site is running over one and a third inches below typical rainfall.

If you're doing a dance to bring on chillier weather, please throw in a rain dance for the region...we could use it!