The Drought Monitor Updates come out every Thursday, but are based on rain up to 7am EST on the most recent Tuesday.

Last week’s big rains came on Wednesday.

Look at the difference. The “Exceptional Drought” category is completely gone. The “Extreme Drought” category is still there but shrunk a little on its northern and northwestern perimeter.

If you want to have some fun, go to the Drought Monitor website. Click on Tennessee (and then a second time on the new map to see counties), and then click on “archive” at the top of the page. Select an area by picking “state” and choosing Tennessee and then “update”. Choose several dates. Then you can use your up/down arrows on your keyboard to toggle through them in order to watch an animation of the changes.

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The winter rains did not show up in the drought areas:

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Thanks to Sharon Prince of Huntland (Franklin County) for the following images of the very low water levels at Tims Ford Lake near Winchester. The drought monitor shows that the southeast corner of Middle Tennessee is still really, really dry. It looks like our next good rain chance won’t arrive until the middle of next week

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Just looked at the latest 10-day forecast and it looks very dry. The basic weather pattern over the summer falls right back in as we count down to Fall (this Sunday morning) as we go across the rest of September. As it looks right now not much in rain chances. It takes awhile for a drought to build, its going to take awhile for it go away. No much reason to pin our hopes on Sept. or Oct. anyway; they are some of our driest months typically. Extreme drought still stretches over Tn and Al.

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Compare last week’s drought map to this week’s drought map. The drought is easing a bit for some spots west of I-65, particularly in West Tennessee. We have a long way to go, but at least we’re headed in the right direction.

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I’ve been researching a little bit in heat wave history for Nashville. There are several different parameters you could use but we’ll stick with a simply one: consecutive 90 degree plus days. We currently have reached a high of at least 90 for five days in a row (average high: 92). Today would make the 6th day in a row- that’s already happened twice this summer. In the forecast we see no significant change in the weather pattern for the next 10 days. If the long range models are correct that will mean a run of 90 degree plus days for over two weeks. We have to look back to the previous decade to find a longer run of hot summer weather: we sweated through 21 days in 98′ and 20 days in 99′. So far this decade the longest run has been 14 days in 2000 along with two runs of at least 12 days (05′ and 06′).

We end July today with a montly rain total of only 1.47″. That would qualify for the driest month at BNA since Oct 05′. It would also go down as the driest July we’ve witnessed since 1986.

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There’s little change in the drought situation since last week. Generally speaking, areas north of I-40 are under a severe drought while the southern half of the mid-state is under an extreme drought. The southern Cumberland Plateau, including Franklin County, has returned to exceptional drought.

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According to the National Weather Service, Nashville measured 15.84″ of rain over the first 6 months of 2007. That’s the 4th driest January through June period on record (records date back to 1870). The last time the year started this dry was 1988.

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The intermittent thundershowers this week haven’t improved the drought much, but we’ll take them. Below is a map of Doppler-derived rainfall totals through the month of June; the shades of yellow indicate rain amounts of 2″ to 4″.

For comparison’s sake, look at the rainfall totals in Oklahoma this month. The shades of pink and purple indicate rain amounts of 10″ to 20″!

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The exceptional drought area has shrunk a little, thanks to the sporadic rains of the last seven days. Here’s the latest drought update for Middle Tennessee (view last week’s update to compare).

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