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Let’s all do a rain dance

3 min read

How’s your lawn doing? Your petunias and tomatoes? To say it’s dry across our region right now is an understatement. The latest Drought Monitor has been updated and now shows almost all of Western Pennsylvania in the abnormally dry category. We desperately need some rain, and this week’s forecast isn’t helping much.

If we don’t measure 0.01 inches of rain at Pittsburgh Airport by midnight Tuesday (our climate site for the city), it will be the longest stretch of no measurable precipitation since 1995. We only registered a trace at the Pittsburgh Airport Saturday, despite a few strong thunderstorm cells that dumped a bit of rain and pea-sized hail across portions of Washington and Greene counties, including North and South Strabane townships. That trace doesn’t officially count as “measurable” to the National Weather Service. Therefore, our consecutive days of no measurable precipitation continued with Sunday marking 14 straight days of no measurable rain.

June is picking up right where May left off when it comes to precipitation. With only 1.73 inches of precipitation measured at Pittsburgh, it was the driest May since 1986. Even though the month started off very chilly, we ended on a very warm note. Overall, the average temperature for the month wound up 1.9 degrees below normal and we ended at 2.10 inches below normal precipitation.

Thankfully, our hot stretch has broken. We officially hit 90 degrees for a daytime high temperature Saturday, which marked the first 90-plus degree day of the year for Pittsburgh. The long-term average is 10 days over 90 degrees for Pittsburgh, but in 2022 we had only four of them and only five in 2021. The record for 90-degree days in Pittsburgh is 50 of them back in 1878!

The dry stretch hitting 14 to 20 days is a pretty big deal for this part of the country and is fairly uncommon. We went through a dry stretch of 14 days in Pittsburgh back in 2012 between May 15 and 28. Our current streak marks one of the longest dry stretches since then.

For the month of May, Pittsburgh has recorded some long dry streaks through the years. The record still stands at 20 days back in 1911 followed by 19 days in 1932, 18 days in 1903 and 16 days in 1898 and again in 1923. Then comes that 14-day stretch in 2012. Our current dry streak has extended over into June and not much rain in the forecast until showers this next weekend. By the way, the all-time longest dry streak in Pittsburgh stands at 26 days, from Oct. 13 to Nov. 7 in 1874.

Maybe if we get everyone who enjoys making dance videos to put on social media to do a group rain dance, it will work to break the streak and avoid a bigger drought. It’s worth a try!

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.

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