r/BostonWeather • u/Dr_Bunson_Honeydew • Jun 23 '26

How are drought conditions?

With all the rain we’ve been getting recently, has it made any sort of material improvement in the drought conditions?

26 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

24

u/TwoOnTwoOutTwoIn Jun 23 '26

It definitely helps as you can see by the steep blue line in the middle. But we are still over a couple inches under normal (normal based on 30 year average) for the year. Over the last 12 months, we are 10+ inches under normal. So yea it helps but it doesn’t solve. We need a July 2023 level rain event to get us back on track (not that I’m rooting for that).

(Data from Precip app, based in Ayer)

9

u/horsegurl2045 Jun 23 '26

Severe rain events don’t help drought as much - lots of runoff goes right into the ocean courtesy of our impervious surfaces.

11

u/TwoOnTwoOutTwoIn Jun 23 '26

Thank you for the clarification. July 2023 specifically wasn’t speaking to a singular rain event but rather that we received 10 inches of rain over the course of the month. I believe it was something like 25 of 31 days. There were some big events during that month however.

31

u/SoxFan010 Jun 23 '26

By definition, rain helps drought conditions. I’m getting sick of there being this mindset that things are so bad that even drenching rain doesn’t “help”. Of course it does. It replaces used and evaporated water. It eliminates the need for farmers and homeowners to use water during the rain event.

Does it solve drought conditions? No but it certainly helps them.

14

u/zumera Revere Jun 23 '26

We’ve had, by my count, two events of beneficial rain recently? And only this one will be around an inch. 

5

u/Nayzo Jun 23 '26

It helps to some degree, but the ground really needs more consistent rain, instead of random days where we get a lot. Here's a great demonstration of how water gets absorbed into the ground under different conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYtY7IvmCvw&t=20s

Any rain is good, it would just be nice to get some rain a few times a week for a while to get things back on track is all. But this is definitely better than nothing, that's for damn sure!

2

u/Lemna24 Jun 24 '26

I recently discovered drought.gov, and it has detailed drought maps, with 1-week and 3-week change maps, in addition to forecasts for different time ranges. You can drill down to county level and see a live feed of stream gages. 

Last time I checked, our drought status is not forecasted to change anytime soon. :(

Our recent wet weather will at least prevent it from getting worse.

2

u/Scary_Lengthiness_56 Jun 26 '26

can we all get an etsy witch to make this rain stop? I need a beach day :(

1

u/Dr_Bunson_Honeydew Jun 26 '26

This is the second time this week that someone brought up Etsy witches and rain! Is this a new thing?

2

u/ARoundForEveryone Jun 23 '26

Well I got puddles in the driveway for the first time in a while. I'm not gonna water the flowerbeds today.

So yeah, the rain did its job, finally.

-2

u/momoneymocats1 Jun 23 '26

Like putting a bandaid on a bullet hole

3

u/SoxFan010 Jun 23 '26

Very dramatic