Will Isaac alleviate our dryness?

While the ‘Burg will be hot and dry the next few days – with temperatures climbing back into the 90′s (F) for one more round of summer weather – the remnants of Hurricane Isaac will be squeezing out copious quantities of moisture out of the atmosphere as the system traverses the Mississippi River valley from south to north.  As dry as the Fredericksburg area is and as badly as we could use the rains from Isaac, there are places in the central U.S. that need the moisture much worse than we do.  Check out this drought map:

Note the angry-looking reds and browns in the Mississippi River valley, especially north of Louisiana.  Now, check out this HPC graphic of the potential precipitation over the next 5 days:

As you can plainly see the highest potential rainfall totals are centered over some of the driest areas of our nation’s heartland.  Granted, dumping several inches of rain at one fell swoop – and doing it toward the end of the growing season – is not the best method for countering drought but it is one of the results of tropical systems in our part of the world.

Will we see any of this rain?  The short answer is “yes”.  We likely won’t get several inches of rain, but what we do receive will come in the form of showers and thunderstorms from Saturday night through Tuesday.  That doesn’t bode well for outdoor activities this Labor Day weekend but it should help the vegetation, including lawns, and pump up the water levels in local streams and rivers.  Sometimes (underlined for emphasis) a tropical system like Isaac is the harbinger of a pattern change which in our case would mean a wetter autumn.    The jury is still out on that one…

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