Last week’s rain didn’t quite cut it as a regional drought-easer, but it might be hint of things to come.
The storm system wasn’t quite organized enough for beneficial rain across our region. Some places got a good soaking, but many others didn’t get much — our weather theme for the past three months.
This left most of the region about where it was with drought just before last week’s rain attempt: Moderate to severe drought generally along and east of the Blue Ridge in the latest U.S. Drought Monitor map, lesser “abnormally dry” conditions to the west through the New River Valley, and only a few counties west of Interstate 77 in Southwest Virginia currently considered free of drought.
One barometer for regional dryness, Carvins Cove, the reservoir in southern Botetourt County that helps supply water to much of the Roanoke Valley and nearby areas, has dipped to nearly 21 feet below full pond, the first time it has been that low since mid-December 2002.
When last it was that low, the cove’s level was rising rapidly, as a remarkable period of frequent rains, boosted by effects of El Niño, effectively ended a four-year period of recurring extreme drought that bracketed the turn of the century in our region.
History repeating itself?
Once again, in 2026, El Niño, the warming of sea surface temperatures in a stripe of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, is cranking, to record strong levels in some parameters already exceeding those of its moderate version in 2002. And our region is again in the throes of a rather lengthy, multi-phased period of drought — though presently across the breadth of Southwest and Southside Virginia, it’s not as extensive or extreme as the drought that peaked in early October 24 years ago.
Last week’s storm system eventually became a well-oiled machine of a nor’easter that damaged beaches with surge from New England to the Carolinas, but it wasn’t that well put together yet over us. We got cool, dry winds behind it for the nicest fall weekend we’ve had yet and coldest mornings we’ve seen so far this season, some 30s in spots and lots of 40s.
After another burst of summerlike warmth the next couple of days that may push a few places to 90, we will finally see a more typical autumn weather pattern kicking in over the weekend into next week, with another chance of decent rainfall and cooler temperatures. This might — finally — be summer’s last gasp.
Down the road, there may be some signs of a more wavy pattern starting to develop that would bring more frequent rain systems to our region. Such would generally be expected with El Niño, especially a strong one, during the cooler months.
Will this be the start of a long-term change in our precipitation fortunes that soaks dry ground and refills reservoirs in the areas still experiencing significant drought? The jury is out on that, but something like what happened 24 years ago is, at the least, a plausible possibility.
The great refill
On Oct. 8, 2002, the U.S. Drought Monitor showed severe to exceptional drought covering all of Virginia except the southwest and northwest tips, which were in moderate drought.
Most of Cardinal News’ modern-day Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area as far west as the Interstate 77 corridor and north to near the Interstate 64 corridor was in extreme drought, with much of the area east of the Blue Ridge and covering most of Southside and Central Virginia in the worst category called “exceptional drought.”
But by the first U.S. Drought Monitor map of 2003, posted on Jan. 7, all of that color had been washed off the map.
Carvins Cove needed only a couple of months after that to refill to full pond in 2003, the second time it recovered from a deep deficit in four years, as it reached about 27 feet below full pond in early October 1999 before being filled again by May 2000.
You may see a common theme here, between 1999, 2002, and potentially 2026: Early October is often when droughts seem to peak, at least as judged by reservoir levels.
There are a few different reasons for this, including how runoff of rainfall increases after leaves fall later in October, and how early October is often right at the pivot point between dry summer and early fall patterns and often wetter mid to late autumn ones.
An important thing to note about the recovery from drought in late 2002 and early 2003 is that it did not happen, for the most part, because of torrential or widespread flood-inducing rainfall.
Neither Roanoke nor Lynchburg saw over an inch of rain in a single calendar day until mid-November. Wytheville tallied even and ample, but not excessive, amounts over each of the last four months of 2002 — 4.28, 4.67, 4.76 and 4.19 inches — to get back to a near-normal 42 inches for the calendar year.
The rains came frequently and broadly once the juicy subtropical branch kicked in with the 2002-03 El Niño, but they didn’t come destructively. Reduced Atlantic tropical activity during El Niño was a likely factor.
Some significant flooding did eventually occur in February 2003, when heavy rains poured onto a hard ice and sleet pack not too dissimilar from what most of our region collected last January, hastening its melt into area rivers.
The presence of that ice and sleet was an example of how the El Niño-charged wet pattern continued through a colder-than-normal winter.
The 2002-03 winter is an oft-forgotten and very underrated winter in our region, but would have been among our elite winters for snow had the core of the President’s Day II snowstorm buried our region instead of missing to the north and leaving us with a glazed-over glacier.
Many locations in our region saw the largest amounts of snow for the season they would see between monster snowstorm winters in 1995-96 and 2009-10, a long stretch of many mild winters with weak snowfall. The wet pattern of late 2002 that eased the drought lingered through winter and was often coupled with southward-oozing Arctic air masses.
During the drought recovery, the first winter storm of 2002-03 left a sleet-crunched shell on top of several inches of snow in the first week of December across much of our region. The last winter storm that season plopped a half-foot or more of tree-breaking snow along and west of the Blue Ridge on March 30, a sudden twist from a warm March and a day after highs in the 70s. In between there were lots of small and medium snowfalls, not huge dumps.
But, we digress, and will soon dive more deeply into winter discussion.
We don’t know yet whether the coming changes in the weather pattern will turn out like 2002 and erase the colors off the drought map by New Year’s. But with El Niño surging, the chances are strong that we will see wetter weather in weeks and months to come.
A reservoir refill may already be ordered and on its way to our water table.
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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