Drought starts getting real to a lot more people when officials start asking them to conserve water.
That isn’t the case everywhere across Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area, at least yet, and there are no mandatory water restrictions anywhere. But last week, Bedford Water issued a statement urging the customers in its Smith Mountain Lake service area “to voluntarily conserve water, with a goal of reducing overall usage by approximately 5–10%.”
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Smith Mountain Lake, the 32-square-mile reservoir formed by the damming of the Roanoke and Blackwater rivers, has a water level near 790 feet above mean sea level presently. The normal level is about 4 feet higher. Sandy, rocky shoals have been exposed along the lake’s shores, some docks being left high and dry.
SML isn’t the only reservoir running low. The Western Virginia Water Authority’s two reservoirs near Roanoke — Carvins Cove and Spring Hollow — are both running about 12 feet below full pond. And the lake at Gatewood Park, Pulaski’s water supply and a popular recreation spot, has been exposing sandy shoals and mud flats for several months as it has run very low.
Showers helpful but not enough
Once again, we have been getting some scattered showers and storms in Southwest and Southside Virginia the past couple of days that may be helpful for some but are not a cure for the long-term drought.
That’s a phrase we’re going to get tired of hearing until there is a major shift to a much wetter pattern.
The next few weeks are going to determine whether or not this long-running drought will attain the next level and become something everyone notices and remembers, not only the people whose livelihoods are most immediately connected to the land.
Drought is insidious. It slowly takes hold without many people even noticing.
Those in agriculture notice first. Ponds and streams and wells dry up. Cultivated plants struggle to grow. People living or often visiting lakes probably notice next as sandy and rocky shorelines seem to get wider.
But for a long time to many of us, drought can seem like a series of nice dry days to get outside. I remember a lot of wonderful hiking days during the fall of 2002 just as truly extraordinary drought was peaking.
At times over the years, I’ve gotten pushback on social media when relating positive sentiments about an ongoing or expected rain during a dry period, especially one coming on a weekend, accused of “wishing for bad weather.”
If it were entirely at my direction, we’d get about eight-tenths of an inch once a week between midnight and 6 a.m. each Thursday morning. That would be enough to keep us near our annual normals that mostly run in the lower 40s of inches and the rain would occur at a time with the least impact for anyone wanting or needing to be outdoors.
While we’re in this drought, I would have it do that twice a week for about three months.
According to National Weather Service data, our region needs 8 to 12 inches of rain in a month to entirely resolve the drought. Over three months, that is 16 to 20 inches, or about 5 to 7 inches each month. Over six months, we’ll need 25 to 30 inches, or about 4 to 5 inches a month.
Three general ways it can go this summer
It would be much better to get more moderate rainfall over a few months as opposed to flooding downpours in a single month. Getting 8 to 12 inches of rain in a month would likely cause flooding even with dry soil. Drainages, natural and manmade, simply cannot handle that much rain that fast no matter how dry it’s been.
Our weather pattern can generally go three ways in the weeks ahead:
(1) Frequent hot, dry high pressure overhead, with soaring temperatures and sparse rainfall. We’ll get a taste of that in the next couple of days when some locations in the Roanoke Valley and east of the Blue Ridge might touch the mid to upper 90s. That would dig us into the kind of memorable extreme drought that would lead to more water restrictions and other adverse effects. Dried-out vegetation would also absorb less solar radiation, allowing the ground and air to heat up that much more, and push temperatures upward. Drought and heat start becoming a vicious cycle, one exacerbating the other. The Drought of ’26, possibly the Heat Wave of ’26, would be something we would all remember.
(2) Frequent periods of ample rainfall begin easing the long-term drought. It might become a sticky, stormy summer that wouldn’t be all that great for getting on the lake, but at least the lakes would be filling back up. We have had some rainy summers in recent times — three of Danville’s 10 wettest summers in over a century of records have happened in the past 12 years, for instance — so this isn’t a bizarre notion. There just isn’t yet much sign that is what is going to happen this particular summer.
(There is a broader global climate context about juxtaposed extremely wet and dry periods — Richmond-based meteorologist Sean Sublette does a good job of discussing that in his blog The Weather Subtext.)
(3) An alternation between sticky, showery periods and drier, hotter ones. The long-term drought doesn’t get dented much but neither does it deepen much, and some localized areas might get short-fused downpours that narrow the deficits more than others. The summer would mostly avoid extended periods of extreme heat and dryness and might have just enough rain to keep the fall from being as fiery as it could be and possibly set us up well for El Niño-charged rainy patterns later in the year.
As of now, option 3 looks like the best guess, with signs of digging upper-level troughs that will scoop at least some moisture for intermittent showery and perhaps stormy periods in weeks ahead.
For now, there are no indications of either long, soaking, deeply drought-denting rains or prolonged runaway heat and dryness in the next couple of weeks, at least.
The drought is unlikely to be cured anytime soon, but it may not get all that much worse.
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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