Weather is always a great topic. Usually you can find someone who likes the current weather, and just down the road there will be some folks who are having a problem because of the weather.
Before we moved to Roanoke in 1989, the region was having a pretty bad drought that lasted through much of the year. The builders were putting the finishing touches on our home early that fall when the rains came.
We got so much rain that it washed our backyard away three times. That same fall while we were staying in an apartment with our kids, Hurricane Hugo marched through the area. It seems like it is always feast or famine when it comes to moisture on the east coast.
It was only a couple of years ago when I got a request from a text book publisher to use a picture of our yard in Roanoke County as an example of drought.
While dry times in the August are not unusual in the Roanoke area, it is a little unusual for February to be so dry. The picture at the top of the post was taken this afternoon just a few hundred yards from our home at a new home construction site. Anyone who has done much digging can tell you that the picture shows some very dry soil. They dug pretty deep, and there are no signs of moisture in the soil.
This afternoon I also watered the new shrubbery that we had planted last summer. I did a fair amount of watering in the summer to get it through the dry spell, but I cannot ever remember watering anything in February.
After all Roanoke is place where the yards often look like this by the end of March. The bluegrass that makes up much of our mountainside yard is more sensitive to lack of moisture than some grasses, but it is native to the area and does well often even into late November or early December. When it gets moisture in the spring, it is hard to mow it enough.
We have had some years like 2006 when hurricanes have brought much needed moisture to our mountains in the fall. We have had some whopper snow storms in March. However, that is moisture of the last resort which I would rather avoid.
Since I split my time between the North Carolina coast and the Roanoke area, I can attest to there being a huge difference this year in precipitation on the coast this year and the Roanoke area.
If you look at the drought monitor which might be updated by the time you see this, I would estimate that Roanoke is in an area of moderate drought while coastal North Carolina is pretty well normal.
Checking out the observed precipitation maps for the last sixty days shows that the Roanoke area has gotten between one and two inches of rain while the coast has seen from six to ten inches of moisture.
While we had a wet fall on North Carolina's coast, the mountains of Virginia just got by with barely enough moisture. Even in the last couple of weeks we have had storms form just off the North Carolina coast and dump either snow or rain on us. While our snow barely lasts until noon the next day, the moisture is a welcome visitor. We have had three good snows this year with one snow coming in at four to seven inches depending on the location.
Also our rains have come as slow steady rains which have soaked into the ground. While the rains were cold, we have managed well over three inches of rain so far in February to go with our January snows.
Our Crystal Coast weather has been weather that many folks in Roanoke would have welcomed.
Fortunately the growing season is not here yet in the mountains, and Roanoke could easily get some good moisture as the patterns change in the next weeks. I am counting on it. Spring is way too early to start watering.
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