Like the answer to most things, it’s complicated. To be sure, the rainfall over the past seven days has been a huge and significant help. We went from a rainfall deficit (since June 1) of more than 8.50 inches to now under 6 inches.
Take a look at this chart which tracks our deficit over the past six weeks or so. You can see the peak deficit was last week before the weekend rainfall. But also note, that while we saw a big drop in that deficit, it’s still worse than it was in mid August.
Another way to look at this is the percentage of normal precipitation since early August as well.
We had some modest rains in mid August which helped but then saw almost no substantial rainfall until this past weekend. Every day that goes by without rain allows the deficit to accumulate so that when you do finally get some rain, it’s not as big of an impact as you think.
We saw a widespread 2 to as much as 6 or more inches of rain for much of Minnesota, except the southwest part of the state over the past 7 days:
But, when we look at the rainfall deficit for the 6 month period, you see the deeper story, no pun intended. That is the soil depths are very dry with that kind of long term dryness.
In fact, while we saw a big improvement, the vast majority of Minnesota (83%) is still in at least moderate drought. That’s down from 95% a week ago but still substantial.
Our biggest improvements were in the most extreme categories: extreme drought (red) and exceptional drought (the highest category, dark brown):
The majority of the Twin Cities metro is now in severe drought (versus extreme) and the southeast metro, namely places like Cottage Grove to Afton are now just abnormally dry and no longer in drought. If we can keep up at least normal precipitation with a couple decent storm systems that dump significant rainfall (it doesn’t have to be 2 to 6 inches) before winter sets in, we can eliminate much of our deficits and maybe even the drought. One storm like we just had however, does not signal a major pattern shift just yet.
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