Ups and downs in a wet 2012

July 17th, 2012 at 9:00 pm by David Mazza under Weather

It looks like our fairly wet month of July is going to coast to a slow down in the next few days as a ridge will be building back into the area. Its crazy to think but at this point of the month we have seen 511% of the normal rainfall for the month. Typically, July is our driest month at Camp Mabry, averaging only 1.88″ of rainfall for the entire month. The most rainfall we have seen in July is 12.80″ and the least amount… none. So our 5.82″ falls in the middle of the extremes.

Below is a graph showing rainfall for each month so far in 2012. What’s interesting is that every other month has been wetter than normal.

If you look at the table below we are 5 for 7 this year on having at or above normal rainfall totals. Only the very dry months of April and June were well below normal. April was almost 10 times drier than normal, with June being almost 72 times drier than normal. For note, June is typically one of our wettest months. Then again, July is typically one of our driest, so we just did a little flip job on the two.

Month	Rainfall	Normal
Jan	4.7	2.22	212%
Feb	3.04	2.02	151%
Mar	5.47	2.76	198%
Apr	0.22	2.09	11%
May	5.45	4.36	125%
Jun	0.06	4.33	1%
Jul	5.82	1.88	310%

The good news is that typically the months of August, September, and October show a slow wetting pattern. August averages 2.35″, September at 2.99″, and October at 3.88″. One just has to hope that we don’t have another 2011 season.

As of today we have received 24.76″ of rain at Camp Mabry, the same time last year, we had only 9.43″. From this date last year until the end of September, we only picked up 0.22″ of rainfall…

The forecast for the next few months calls for an increasing El Nino, which would decrease the likelihood of a repeat of last summer’s dry weather. The forecast from the Climate Prediction Center for the next 3 months calls for near normal precipitation from July-September. I doubt this forecast included us seeing most of the rainfall in one week in July.

If the El Nino continues as forecasted over the next few months, this could mean possibly wetter than normal conditions heading into the Fall as well.

Yay for the rain! We’ll keep hoping for more. Lets see how much we all love this rain when we get done pulling weeds and trying to cut our thick lawns this week