With water use restrictions now in place for the city of Raleigh and little rain in sight, the drought conditions across our area and the entire state have been top of mind.
New data released on Thursday showed the seasonal drought is expected to last well into the summer, at least through the end of July.
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Let's look at how much rain we need within the next month to end our drought and our chances of the drought ending within the same time period.
As a reminder, the severe drought covers nearly our entire area with the exception of a small portion of Moore County. There are parts of Wake, Durham, Nash, Edgecombe, Halifax, Northampton, Warren and Vance counties under extreme drought conditions.
The National Weather Service pointed out Wednesday that it is the third-driest start to spring at RDU with only 1.71 inches of rain between March 1 and April 15. That's 4.14 inches below normal.
It's been the sixth-driest start to spring at Fayetteville Regional Airport. There's only been 1.73 inches of rain there, which is 2.94 inches below normal. It's also been the driest January 1 to April 15 timeframe on record at RDU with only 6.06 inches of precipitation total. That's only half of what we normally see!
In order for us to end the drought within a one-month time period, we would need a significant amount of rain. Most of our area needs between 8 and 10 inches of rain, while areas toward Moore County and west toward Charlotte need close to 12.5 inches. The southern mountains need about 13.5 inches of rain.
The chances of our drought ending within a one-month time period are quite low. Most of our area has a less than 1% chance of seeing an end to the drought within that time period. For southeastern parts of our area, it's ever so slightly higher but still only between 1-2%. The southern mountains have only a 0.04% of seeing an end to the drought.
WRAL meteorologist Chris Michaels dug into how the severe and extreme drought affects us, including water restrictions, loss of crops, etc. If more spots get into the extreme drought category, we could see even more water restrictions than what we've already seen, higher nitrate levels in forage and even decreases in hydropower generation.
