A Halloween twist: Rain could break drought spell

Western Pennsylvania’s spookiest surprise this Halloween might not be ghosts or goblins — it’s rain. While the region has been parched with drought, there’s a chance Mother Nature will break the dry spell with showers Thursday night.

Meteorologist Rich Redmond of the National Weather Service in Moon said rivers and creeks have been low because of a stubborn dry spell.

The numbers back it up. This year is set to be the warmest on record in the region, NWS hydrologist Alicia Miller says, with a summer so steamy it ranked the eighth warmest for the Pittsburgh area. It’s not just the lack of rain, she explained; it’s the heat, too. “We’re very, very warm, very, very dry,” she said. “It’s a recipe for drought.”

Droughts are essentially prolonged dry spells in the natural climate cycle, Redmond said. The U.S. Drought Monitor shows drought expanding fast across the country.

“The thing that makes it worse, too, is this time of the year is one of our more drier parts of the year,” he said. “We don’t see much rain now anyways. It’s just kind of making things worse.”

In June, less than 12% of the country was experiencing drought. Now it’s almost 50% and growing, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Closer to home, Allegheny County’s seeing moderate drought, while Westmoreland County is mostly in severe drought.

So-called “heat domes” are hovering across the country, trapping intense heat for days on end. And despite a rainy April, the skies barely delivered any thunderstorms or precipitation for months.

So while Halloween’s forecast calls for a bit of rain, we’ll need more than a drizzle to break this spell.

Approximately 7.8 million out of over 13 million Pennsylvania residents are in areas of drought, according to the monitor, which is up by 19.6% since last week. And 46 states are experiencing moderate drought conditions or worse this week.

Miller said determining if a place is in a drought depends on various factors, such as how long it’s been dry, how high the temperatures are and how low bodies of water are. She said people in the local agriculture industry and state representatives are often consulted as well.

“It’s probably hard to believe that we can have a drought after we had so much rain in April,” Miller said. “We were very close to hitting the wettest April on record. Right after that, we completely dried out.”

Though Western Pennsylvania saw a good amount of rain in April and May, June saw less thunderstorm activity and less overall weather, Redmond said.

April saw 7.93 inches of rain, which is 4.61 inches above normal, and May saw 5.61 inches, which is 1.78 inches above normal, he said.

At the measurement point at the Pittsburgh International Airport, Redmond said June was 1.62 inches below the normal amount of rainfall, and July was 1.09 inches below normal. August saw a small increase, at 1.06 inches above normal, but he said the most of that came in one day.

September was similar to the summer, he said, almost 1.5 inches below the normal. In October so far, it’s reached about 1.5 inches below normal rainfall as well.

So in total, since June, that’s about 4 to 5 inches less than the area should be, Redmond said.

“We don’t really see any change in that at least for the foreseeable future,” he said.

The drought has also affected the fall foliage by making the leaves fall faster than normal, Redmond said. He said trees need to conserve the water that they get.

“In order to do that, they drop leaves,” he said. “(The drought) has affected timing — it kind of sped everything up.”

Redmond said he is unable to predict exactly when the dry pattern will end.

Trick-or-treating weather

There will be a chance of rain for the trick-or-treaters Thursday night, Redmond said, which is the area’s “best chance” for rain in the coming days.

“It’s not going to be heavy rain,” he said.

There will possibly be two-tenths of an inch of pretty scattered and light rain that will end around midnight or 1 a.m., Redmond predicted.

However, the weather will be warm, with highs approaching 80 degrees, he said.

Redmond said in the evening around trick-or-treating time, temperatures will still be in the 70s, and it won’t cool down to the 60s until probably after 9 or 10 p.m.

The area won’t be back to “normal temperatures” until Friday, he said, when it will be cooler in the upper 50s and 60s.

Affecting planting

For Michelle Kubrick, part owner of Kubrick Brothers Garden Center in Plum, this summer’s drought hurt sales on outdoor items.

“People just weren’t into buying outdoor stuff in that heat,” she said.

The scorching summer not only dried up plant sales but also sucked the moisture right out of the topsoil, Miller said. In some of the worst-hit areas, Miller says farmers gave up on crops like corn and soybeans.

Kubrick’s garden center managed to stay watered up, but the bills told a different story. “Water bills were definitely higher,” she said. “and we lost more plants than usual.”

Employees have been busy giving customers extra tips to help their plants survive in the drought, and landscaping projects, though a bit pricier, haven’t slowed down. In fact, Kubrick credits the warmer fall for making it easier to install landscaping.

“This has been one of the nicest falls,” she said. “Not freezing, not too cold—it’s actually been kind of good for us.”

Their plants that did make it through are thriving, thanks to what she calls “a system that works for us.” She’s keeping a close eye on the unusual weather patterns.

“It’s been so strange,” she said with a laugh. “I wish I had a Magic 8 Ball to see what’s next, but so far, as long as there’s water, we’ll keep going.”

Looking ahead

In the next six to 10 days, there will be a little change to the dry pattern with a little more rain starting with Halloween, Redmond said.

“We’re not really in a wet pattern,” he said. “It’s going to take a while to improve conditions around here — we need to see some sustained wet pattern for a couple months to get things closer to where they should be.”

When there’s a dry pattern, the dryness affects any storms that may be coming through, which in turn cuts down on the rainfall that the storms are able to produce, according to Redmond.

“We only had one day this month when we had any substantial rainfall,” he said of Oct. 6, which saw 1.07 inches. “But most of it came in one day, and that didn’t help.”

The last time the area saw rain was on Oct. 23, and it was only a one-hundredth of an inch, and before that was one-hundredth of an inch on Oct. 16, according to Redmond.

“It looks like we’re not going to get out of this dry pattern for awhile,” he said.