There have been intermittent showers the last few days in Virginia, with even a few strong to severe thunderstorms possible as this Cardinal Weather column posts on Wednesday afternoon the day before April ends.
There may be some more showers and storms by the weekend, but these are just drops in a dusty bucket.
We are at a point in Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area, and really, across the commonwealth of Virginia, when the long-running drought could teeter into something extraordinary with high impacts, if it lingers into summer when heat and dryness can intensify each other in a vicious cycle.
Earlier this month, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality expanded a drought warning to cover all of Virginia except the Southwest corner generally west of Interstate 77, the Hampton Roads area in the southeast corner and the Eastern Shore. Those areas are only one step back under a drought watch.
Ponds and water tables have been drying up, rivers, streams and reservoirs have been getting low, and vegetation has been at least somewhat stymied in growth by the lack of rainfall. Agricultural impacts are already starting to occur, coupled with some freeze damage from the summer-to-winter roller-coaster of temperatures we have been riding much of March and April. (A couple of frosty mornings are possible early next week as well.)
A dry April has finally moved above an inch total for some areas along and west of the Blue Ridge with showers over the weekend and in the last couple of days, but is likely to stay below that mark in much of Southside Virginia unless a rogue thunderstorm dumps a localized downpour on this Wednesday.
The large-scale atmospheric pattern has shifted to one in which the jet stream has been forced farther south across the central and eastern United States. This is allowing more storm systems and fronts to move through, bringing rounds of showers and storms to our region every three days or so, but as yet, no sign of a truly widespread and soaking rain.
What could have potential to be one this weekend looks as if the heaviest part will likely stay to our south, falling on states that arguably need the rain even more desperately than we do.
May brings fresh hope for those seeking a good rain, as it has a recent history of being a wet month even in some dry years. Roanoke, for instance, has topped 6 inches of rain in six of the last 10 Mays, including 7.55 inches in a year ago in what was an overall dry 2025.
But presently, according to National Weather Service data, it would take 9 to 12 inches of rain in May to completely end the drought across our region.
Getting that much rain so quickly would cause its own problems — the “drought always ends in flash flooding” saying — so getting 13 to 15 inches over two months, 16 to 18 inches over three months, or 27 to 30 inches over 6 months would be a more balanced way to divvy up the needed rainfall.
Dryness has been an off-and-on event for the past couple of years in much of Virginia, especially the Shenandoah Valley and Northern Virginia.
In the Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area of Cardinal News, there have been enough short-fused wet periods to interrupt long-term drought most of that time, but drought has gotten more serious and widespread since late last summer and early autumn.
During that time period, many locations saw their greatest single “rainfall” when snow and sleet in late January melted down to over an inch.
Rainfall since September is the least in 28 years of records at Galax (15.43 inches) for that time period, following what was a locally wet summer there. It’s the second driest September to April period (as of Monday) in 33 years of data at Clintwood (18.88 inches) and 103 years of data at Burke’s Garden (18.33 inches), those locations actually being outside the DEQ drought warning area in the drought watch.
Danville has had the third least September to April rainfall (14.14 inches) in 94 years of records (data goes back to 1917, but there are some missing years) and third in 76 years of data at Martinsville (16.10 inches). The September to April period, through Monday, ranked in the top 10 driest with 50 to 133 years of data at Roanoke (14.33 inches), Wytheville (14.49 inches), Blacksburg (15.72 inches), Lynchburg (16.27 inches) and Abingdon (22.45 inches). Tuesday and Wednesday showers aren’t likely to move the needle much on these rankings.
In nearly all these places, the last September to April period that was even drier occurred in 2001-02, the final year of a late 1990s-early 2000s extremely dry period that came in two waves.
Like the recent dry years, that was correlated with a repeating La Niña event, as a stripe of equatorial Pacific waters turned cooler than normal. This pattern is often linked to drier patterns in the Southeast U.S., as the overhead high pressure develops and blocks wet storm systems.
The 1999-2002 dry period turned sharply on its head by the winter of 2002-03 as an El Niño developed, with warm equatorial Pacific waters and a much wetter flow with a strong subtropical jet stream across the southern tier of the U.S.
There are strong signals that El Niño will return by the latter half of this year and might be an exceptionally strong one, which could again flip our rainfall fortunes from drought to deluge, though this is never certain pending the influence of other factors.
That is a distant hope for those seeing their ponds and streams drying up now. But before then, we’ll see if a changed weather pattern and May’s recent proclivity for sogginess can offer at least some partial drought relief.
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.
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