At the end of June, WUNC reported that month was one of the driest on record in North Carolina.
The State Climate Office reported Chapel Hill got just half an inch of rain the entire month.
Then, like the proverbial flood, came the months of July and August. That same gauge recorded 10 inches of rain last month and around six inches so far this month. Meanwhile, a drought that had spread across the state has been wiped out.
WUNC's Will Michaels spoke with Assistant State Climatologist Corey Davis about North Carolina's rapid swing from dry to wet.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Remind us what the weather has been like in July in August.
Well, this is really a case of weather whiplash that we've seen more and more of in recent years, not only how quickly we slipped into that drought — we had no drought at all across the state in the middle of June and by the end of the month, we had more than half of the state classified in moderate to severe drought — but also how quickly we've come out of that drought just over the last four to five weeks.
You mentioned the rain that we had back in July. That went a long way at chipping away at some of those drought conditions. But as early August has gotten here, we saw Tropical Storm Debby a week ago, and that finished the job from what July had started. It wiped all the drought off the map in North Carolina, and again, this has been a remarkably quick turnaround from when we were at that peak of the drought just a month ago.
How much of an impact did Debby really have?
Across the eastern half of the state, most areas had already overcome that deficit that they were in, in June, by the end of July. So, places like Wilmington, Fayetteville, Raleigh, we were all pretty much back to our normal precipitation. So, in those areas, when that rain from Debby came down, there was not a lot of room in the soils and the streams for that excess moisture to go. So, that's why we saw the flooding issues in those areas.
I would say the rain from Debby was more beneficial as we went further west, especially getting out toward the Triad. Places like Winston-Salem had still been three to four inches below their normal summer precipitation before that storm last week, so the rain from Debby was really just what the doctor ordered. It's exactly the sort of rainfall amount that they were looking for. That's why we've seen that drought improvement in those areas.
Back in June, corn crops had a really hard time, and some were lost. But how quickly could farmers recover from the dry conditions in June, given all of this rain that we've had in July and August?
This is another great example of just how quickly things have changed over the summer. We had pretty wet weather in May, so drought was no concern going into the month of June. In fact, a lot of farmers at that time were saying how relieved they were to have a couple weeks of dry weather just so they could get out in the fields work on cutting their hay.
Of course, that dry weather quickly became too much of a good thing, and when we added the heat on top of that, that led to those very rapidly drying conditions. And some of the later planted corn looks like it'll fare a little bit better. But a lot of the other crops, you think about the tobacco, the soybeans, the hay and the pastures, they've generally done pretty well.
Certainly, a lot of farmers are still taking the chance now to survey their fields and figure out whether there's any wind or water damage from Tropical Storm Debby last week. Also, in areas in eastern North Carolina that have been underwater for the last week, there will be concerns for things like sweet potatoes and peanuts. These are crops, of course, that grow in the ground, so they really don't tolerate being waterlogged for that long. So, we'll hope that some of that rain is able to move out of here, get that moisture out of the ground, and then for some of those farmers that were hit by the early summer drought, maybe have a more productive end to the growing season this year.
