It is hard to beat the weather we’ve had in the past couple of weeks of October, simply for how great it feels being outside.
We’ve had cool mornings, mild to warm afternoons, lots of sunshine and no rain.
The autumn leaves have been slowly turning colors, and there hasn’t been much wind to start ripping them loose.
You might need a jacket in the morning and be comfortable in short sleeves by afternoon, with neither premature deep winter chill nor stubbornly late summer stickiness.
But the words “no rain” underlie the continuing reality that much of southern Virginia east of the Blue Ridge continues in moderate to severe drought and most other areas of the state are close enough that a few dry weeks, should the expected El Niño rains tarry or be underwhelming, could easily teeter into deeper stages of drought again.
It’s still dry
It has not rained in any significant amounts in Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area since Oct. 17. Many areas west of the Blue Ridge collected 1-2 inches back on Oct. 3-4, and most of our region got 1-4 inches, with locally more, on Oct. 11-12 connected to the remnants of Hurricane Isaias.
The exception on Oct. 11-12 was a patch of Southside near and just east of Danville into part of Halifax County and a little northward, where many gauges failed to collect even half an inch in the Isaias rains. This is the region still colored dark red for extreme drought in last week’s U.S. Drought Monitor.
A new U.S. Drought Monitor map will be posted on Thursday, using data through Tuesday of this week. It will likely show a slight increase in size and intensity of the drought area in Virginia, given that no rain has fallen in the past week.
After the water level rose a little more than 2 feet at Carvins Cove after the Isaias rains, it has slipped back down a half-foot again to almost 20 feet below full pond again. Smith Mountain Lake, after a little boost from the river and stream runoff with Isaias, is still about 4 feet below its full pond.
The John H. Kerr Reservoir/Buggs Island Lake, located near the desert spot in Southside but having gotten some nice downstream flow from the Roanoke/Staunton River, is still 12 feet below its full pond. Yes, there is some utility control on the lake levels with the bigger dammed-up reservoirs, but they are still not going to be reaching some docks if there is limited upstream discharge.
The lack of wind has been a blessing in the recent dry weeks as it has kept there from being high fire danger situations. Even in areas where drought has been quelled for the time being, surface fuels can dry out quickly with multiple days of sunny dryness, and more leaves are starting to fall.
Changes ahead?
There are a couple of hints of possible changes ahead in the weather pattern that might lead November to be wetter and, possibly, as we approach Thanksgiving, colder.
Sunday looks to bring a chance of rain to our region, likely arriving after the goblins have gone home with their candy bags on Halloween night.
It’s a little unclear yet if this will just be some intermittent, spotty showers or if it might turn into a decent soaker, an inch or so for some. The cold front behind the rain will drop temperatures back some entering next week, after a few spots around might scrape 80 on this coming Friday.
Behind this storm, a more powerful low-pressure system may take shape in the central U.S. next week, the kind you expect to see as we make the turn from the warmer seasons to colder ones.
This low may or may not move close to us next week, but either way, it probably slings through another rain-bearing cold front sometime toward the middle to latter part of next week.
Some long-range models have begun to paint more green colors across the South toward our region in November, signaling wetter conditions. Could these next two storm systems be a start of the expected El Niño rain train? Or just another showery mirage that will pass and leave us pretty dry yet again.
There is no deep pool of Arctic air to tap with either of the next cold fronts, but there are also some signals that the polar vortex circling the North Pole in the stratosphere will split in coming days, perhaps eventually leading to a lobe of cold air sagging southward across Canada toward the U.S.
There are mixed signals galore on this, and lots of discussion and debate among meteorological minds about whether such an event would necessarily lead to deep cold as it often does for some portion of the U.S. come mid-November and beyond.
A polar vortex split like might happen isn’t really something we expect to see during the fall with a higher-end El Niño, the warming of a stripe of equatorial Pacific waters that is soaring quickly to extreme levels rarely or never seen in at least the last 75 years of human observation and, as far as can be discerned from historical accounts, rarely challenged even going back a few centuries.
Mild Pacific air often floods the U.S. with strong El Niño patterns in late fall and early winter, with Arctic intrusions often waiting until mid-January and beyond. Could a deep Arctic shot make much headway against that mild flow in November and/or December this year?
The general thinking is there might be a cooling of temperatures to something a little below normal near Thanksgiving and then a recovery toward a widespread warm Christmas season in much of the U.S, much like what happened in the 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 strong El Niño winters.
But with both the strength of El Niño this early on the calendar and a possible unusual polar vortex split, we may be in some uncharted territory.
That may make it even more difficult for us to try to chart seasonal snowfall, when we ask for your contest entries and I take a stab at it myself in coming weeks.
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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