Monday, August 25, 2008
Weather columnist Kevin Myatt: August may set record for dryness in Roanoke unless Fay swings by with needed rain
Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.
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Roanoke has a shot at weather history this week.
If the city's official weather-reporting station at Roanoke Regional Airport does not get at least .66 inches of rain today through Sunday, it will be Roanoke's driest August on record, dating to mid-1947.
If no rain at all falls, it will be only the third month on record to have less than a tenth of an inch of rain. It will take .07 inches to keep this from being one of the three driest months.
Roanoke has only gotten .09 inches of rain so far this month. Only two months -- October 2000 (.02 inches) and October 1991 (.04 inches) -- have had less rain. September 1991 is next on the list, with only .15 inches.
It might be surprising that, in the past 60 years, August has never really been as bone dry as it is now. Only one previous August, in 1995, had less than an inch of rain -- .74 inches.
But the possibility of setting a new August dryness standard faces a serious challenge.
The former Tropical Storm Fay originally looked like it had a good chance to bring us rain last week. Instead, it hung around Florida all week, but its remnants are likely to make a run at us by Wednesday.
Though we don't want anything close to the 20 to 30 inches that parts of Florida got, we badly need rain.
Let's see if Fay, for all the mayhem it has caused to our south, can belatedly deliver on its promise of rain for our dry region and keep August 2008 out of the record books.
