On Tue, 6 Sep 2005 11:08:49 -0400, Evan Osler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>While I have no doubt that many parts of the northeast are approaching
>drought conditions, it looks as though Burlington is still running a
>surplus of sorts, at least over the past 90 days (if you look at the
>previous 30 days, the picture is a little bleaker).
>
>http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/global_monitoring/precipitation/sn72
617_90.gif
>
>East of the Greens, I heard on the radio the other day that Waterbury
>received over 6" of precip in August alone. I was in the mountains 40
>miles south this weekend however and the foliage did look quite a bit
>browner..

Southern New England has been hurting although they did have some isolated 
heavy rains over the past two weeks...but overall, the past three months 
have been very warm.  Most of the state of CT, R.I., and eastern half of 
Mass have been very warm and dry this year.  I read that some people in 
Providence, R.I. have already had to rake their yards of dead brown 
leaves.  PVD hit 100 degrees this summer and the last time that happened 
was in 2002 and then before that it was like 1995 or '96 (though I'm not 
positive)...and they also had a top 3 driest summer on record.  The data 
is very similar everywhere from BOS to NYC.  And I just noticed the other 
day that the southern tier of NY was added to the abnormally dry list from 
the gov't guys. 

Further north, it hasn't been as bad in Burlington as a very wet late 
spring/early summer pumped up a slight surplus.  The Adirondacks have had 
plenty of rain this summer as they are always in the path of thunderstorms 
riding in on cold fronts from the north and west.  

The only problem with reported precipitation amounts in the summer is that 
we get our rainfall mostly from thunderstorms which are not always a 
given...and one location maybe bone dry, but 2 miles away they have 
recieved several inches of rainfall from pop up thunderstorms.  So the 
localized nature of thunderstorms plus the localized nature of airport 
reporting stations can give some very different numbers all within the 
same region.  I heard of one airport in Michigan (I forget which one, 
might be one of the Detroit ones) that set up two rain buckets at each end 
of the airport (1 mile difference or so), and at the end of June there was 
a 1.5" diffence between total rainfall which illustrates the isolated 
nature of storms.

-Scott

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