We Are Stuck In A Dry Weather Pattern

Talk to any farmer or gardener and they will likely share their grievance over our lack of rain since mid July. Wisconsin's corn and soybean crops are at the critical stage of filling out those corn kernels or plumping up the beans. The lack of rain is hurting that process and many crops are stressing. Home gardeners are likely tired of watering the flowers and veggies. We need a good soaking. Unfortunately, the outlook for relief from this dry pattern isn't optimistic.

The spring and summer started off in good shape. In fact, some areas were wetter than normal. We were getting fairly timely rains through mid July, then it just shut off. In general, high pressure has been persistent over the Great Lakes, keeping most of the rain off to our west and south.

The images below show our rainfall over the past 7 and 14 days, from July 30-Aug 6 and July 23-Aug 6, 2015, respectively.

Over this 7 day period, southern Wisconsin really only had rain on one day, Sunday, Aug 2 and it only affected the far southeast. Almost cruelly, most of Milwaukee county missed out on much of that rain.

This 14 day graphic shows two separate rain events. The one on Aug 2 over the southeast and the other was a fairly focused rain event that occurred during the overnight hours of July 29th and hit mainly Dane county. The Dane County Regional Airport received just shy of 1 1/2 inches of rain. Otherwise, the remainder of south central and southeast Wisconsin has been very dry. Most places haven't seen a decent rainfall since July 18th. That's almost 3 weeks!

The United States Drought Monitor has just labeled parts of southern Wisconsin as Abnormally Dry in the weekly Drought Outlook. See image below. If we don't get much rain over the next week, we'll likely see that area expand with next week's update.

Here are the Climate Prediction Center's 6-10 day and 8-14 day precipitation outlooks. This is not encouraging. Both suggest the dry pattern could continue for the next 1 to 2 weeks. This is not a certainty and weather patterns can suddenly change, it's just that the odds aren't in our favor at this time.

6-10 Day Outlook

8-14 Day Outlook

Davis