Damp weekend ahead – Dry April.

This certainly looks like the greyest weekend we’ve had on tap for a while. That’s probably not a bad thing. It has been a fairly dry few weeks. I know my yard and newly popped open flowers, bushes, grapes, rhubarb – even the strawberries have flowers already – they could all use a good drink.

That said it doesnt look like a particularly strong event at all. We should continue to cloud over today and the first showers might come tonight.

The meat of the front isn’t slated to get to us until around 10AM tomorrow morning:

Doesn’t look very impressive does it.

So how dry has it been?

Well our normal precipitation for April is 110mm

My station has received 53mm., the official Airport station? Only 51mm.

So there is no way we are going to get to our ‘Normal’ values in the next 4 days.

And just to give a further indication of how that lack of rain dries up the ground. Go to my monthly page and check out the ‘Evapotranspiration’ and ‘Net Moisture’ numbers. Thanks to the solar radiation sensor and combined with the wind, the station measures how much evaporation occurs.

Precip: 52.83mm
Evap: -60.66mm
Net: -7.83mm

So clearly if we were anywhere near our normal 100mm in April we would be still gaining moisture in our gardens, grasses and forests. As it is, we are already drying out.

So don’t be too sad if the rains come heavier than forecast. We could use them.

Oh! I almost forgot!
Heads Up!