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Getting very dry

While there were a few scattered showers Thursday night, it has now been 3 weeks since the last rain of substance at my Cheviot 0.9 SSE location.

August stats to date:

Date Maximum Minimum Observation Total 24 hr
1 82 59 75 T
2 81 67 67 T
3 81 57 77 0.00
4 77 65 65 1.27
5 77 63 73 0.01
6 77 60 67 0.00
7 81 59 67 T
8 87 67 81 0.00
9 89 68   0.00
10 87 70   0.29
11 82 68   0.00
12 83 64   0.00
13 84 65   0.00
14 84 62   0.00
15 87 63   0.00
16 89 71   0.00
17 87 68 80 0.02
18 85 71 79 T
19 87 72 75 0.01
20 85 72 77 0.03
21 81 67 75 0.00
22 75 59 63 T
23 73 57 65 0.00
24 77 53 67 0.00
25 82 57 75 0.00
26 87 63 75 0.00
27 87 66 75 0.00

Total rainfall:  1.63

Watering instructions, rain gauges:  Click here.

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Dry August to date

After a cool, wet July, August has been quite dry at my Cheviot 0.9 SSE location.  There has only been one really good rain here all month with 1.27 inch on the 4th.   In the past 16 days I have recorded only 0.35 inch.  Lawns are beginning to slump into summer dormancy in my neighborhood.

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Wet here, dry there: an important lesson

Monday, I was amazed to find out just how spotty recent rains have been.  Just a few miles from my over-worked rain gauge I found a dry landscape and a tree which needed water.

Particularly heavy rain passed over my location recently, resulting in the following very impressive but hardly representative rainfall totals:

3 day rainfall last week: 3.28
July rainfall: 6.94
June-July total: 12.17

Monday, I looked at a tree in Cleves, OH, just a few miles west of my location.  I had to dig some dirt away from the base of this relatively young Kousa dogwood.  It had been planted a little too deep.

The soil was bone dry down to several inches.  I had seen a couple CoCoRaHS rainfall reports near Cleves which were substantially lower than at my house.  Apparently Cleves missed much of the recent rain.  I can confirm that much of the heavy rainfall I received was from small cells which did not cover a large area.

The take home message:  You cannot rely on the rainfall at the airport or at other reporting stations to determine how much rain fell in your yard.  You must have a rain gauge and keep track of what falls in your yard.  Click here to find Arbor Doctor’s rain gauge selection.