The faucets have turned on to wash away our spring drought.
The old adage “drought always ends in flash flooding” was proven to have merit again. There have been scattered reports of roads and creeks inundated around parts of Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area on Monday and Tuesday, plus some small mudslides in the mountains. Heavy rain will do that kind of stuff no matter how dry it’s been beforehand.
Unfortunately, word has come that a 12-year-old boy was washed away by flood waters in Albemarle County.
While this rainfall appears to be widespread and ample enough to significantly reduce or eliminate drought for the time being, it’s definitely premature to declare that drought is entirely over for the summer ahead. We’ve already seen how we can get historic rainfall totals in some parts of our region with Hurricane Helene’s inland impacts last September, then get back in drought again over the following months, then get flooding rain with a side dish of tree-breaking ice and some snow in February, then go dry yet again over March and April.
Last week’s U.S. Drought Monitor map for Virginia (updates anew on Thursday) showed a rather broad stripe of moderate drought along and east of the Blue Ridge through the middle of our region, then expanding even wider across much of Northern Virginia, with a couple patches of severe drought. The Shenandoah Valley in particular has had an especially hard time shaking dryness over the last two years.
But some of the heaviest rain tracked right through that stripe Monday and Tuesday, with 1-4 inches totals quite common across much of our region as a series of bands of rain and some thunderstorms by a stubborn upper-level low to the west. Over 7 inches had fallen by Tuesday evening at a remote weather station operated by Virginia Tech atop Apple Orchard Mountain at over 4,200 feet above sea level along the Bedford-Botetourt county border.
With some colder air aloft with the upper-level low and strong instability after some peeks of sunshine warmed the surface, there were several reports of hail with Tuesday afternoon storms, as large as 1 inch in diameter in one report from Lynchburg. This was the second time in the past week that large hail had emanated from some storms, as a few supercells that moved across our region last Thursday evening (May 8) dropped big hail on some parts of our region.
How we got here
When the last deep Arctic air intrusion from our cold, icy winter withdrew in late February, we promptly went into a jet stream pattern that focused storminess over the central U.S., tracking well west and north of our region. In some spring seasons, there is a period of time when the jet stream is bringing storm systems across the South and into our region, keeping it wet and sometimes stormy. We pretty much skipped that phase this year, leaving us high and dry much of March and April, among the top 10 driest March-April periods on record in over a century of records at multiple locations in our region.
Over the last several days, the jet stream retreated even farther to the north, leaving a couple of slow-moving upper-level lows stuck over the southern U.S. The latest of these lollygagging lows dug into the southeast U.S., lifting moisture of the Gulf of Mexico/Gulf of America (your choice) and the western Atlantic across the southeastern U.S and ultimately into the Appalachians and the Mid-Atlantic region.
We haven’t had this kind of deep moisture surge into our region since the rapid-fire series of rain, snow and ice events in mid February that brought so much flooding, ice and wind damage to our region. It appears at this writing that we have weathered this round much more intact than we did in February, partly because it was so dry beforehand, and in fact many would call this rain beneficial.
As of early Wednesday, no main-stem rivers were expected to go over flood stage in our region, and any flooding creeks (Craig Creek near Camp Easterseals in Craig County was a little over its bank according to a remote sensor, and there was on water rescue from a home in Alleghany County along Indian Draft Creek, for a couple examples) should return to their banks within a day or two.
Where we’re going
Going forward, the pattern is changing again, as the jet stream begins to deep more deeply into the western half of the U.S., with the likelihood of repeat periods of severe storms again in the central U.S. over the next week or two.
For our region, we’ll see temperatures spike upward to summerlike 80s-near 90 highs late this week, with periods of showers and storms possible as the upper-level low slowly gets pushed eastward. A cold front approaching Friday may trigger more widespread storms, some of which could be severe, before moving toward warm but drier weather over the weekend into next week.
There are some signs of a cooler dip in the jet stream flow over the Eastern U.S. by late month, and the transition from the warmer pattern to the cooler one in between could be unsettled.
In all, May is looking wetter, but not excessively wet, and stormier, but not extraordinarily so, with some sunny, warm, and perhaps sticky days in between the rounds of showers and storms.
We’ll talk a little more about summer — and get your highest temperature guesses — soon.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:
