A flash drought turns to flash floods across parts of the southeast
It’s been quite the summer across the southeast and Mid-Atlantic as bouts of intense and prolonged heat roasted the region. Hot temperatures, bright sunshine, and scant rainfall forced the region to fall into a flash drought over the course of a single month.
The United States Drought Monitor at the beginning of June showed no drought anywhere across the southeast. The only region that was starting to slip behind in the rainfall department was central Virginia, which was abnormally dry as of the June 11 update of the USDM.
Fast forward a month and change and it’s a completely different story. A significant swath of the region had fallen into a severe or extreme drought. This is a short-term drought—the kind that affects crops and lawns instead of reservoirs and wells.
Things changed in a hurry last week as the pattern flipped from hot and dry to…well, hot and wet.
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| Source: Tropical Tidbits |
For the past few days, we’ve seen troughing off to the west with a strong ridge of high pressure over the Atlantic to the east. This new regime broke the ridging that brought record-breaking temperatures to the region, including the all-time hottest temperature ever recorded at Raleigh-Durham International Airport and a string of 100-degree days in Washington and Baltimore.
A constant flow of humid air pumping in from the Gulf of Mexico juiced the atmosphere and primed the region for daily bouts of thunderstorms.
As a result, some areas in North Carolina and Virginia have completely reversed their rainfall deficits in recent days. Precipitation totals over the past 60 days are showing above-normal values across portions of eastern North Carolina and southern Virginia that have dealt with constant storms and repeated rounds of flash flooding.
It’s been hit-or-miss, though, given the pop-up nature of the storms. One town gets a deluge while folks down the street look on in envy (or relief).
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| Source: CPC |
The latest outlook from the Climate Prediction Center shows that this pattern of warmer temperatures with routine thunderstorms is likely going to continue heading into the month of August. Of course, seeing above-normal precipitation throughout the southeast moving into the peak of what’s expected to be an active hurricane season is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser…but for now, at least, there’s nothing to worry about on the horizon.
