Sacred Rain

It's raining. It's raining alot. Many Texans and Okies are giving thanks today for the skies finally opening up and pouring forth. It's been a beautiful rain as it has all been light to moderate yet steady. It's a good, soaking rain with little if any runoff. Many areas of northern Texas and southern Oklahoma received between 0.5" and 1.5" with some areas around the central Red River Valley getting 2" or more. Of course, not all areas got that much (generally along and west/southwest of a Bowie, Eastland, to Temple line) and portions of central OK got nothing. But, this is a good start for alot of areas and will give many heroic firefighters a chance to relax and take a break.

Here at my house in the western outskirts of McKinney, I got close to an inch of total rainfall. I actually opened up the shades this morning and enjoyed seeing the rain falling outside and running off the roof. I usually don't like cold gray rainy days, but today was an exception.

Fortunately, there is yet another good storm system poised to affect us in a few more days with good model agreement. The dynamics look stronger with this one and we could see some elevated strong to severe thunderstorms storms with a hail threat. Beyond that, the longer range models are really shoring up well in keeping an active split flow pattern setup for us in the near future...out to 10 days and even beyond. This would be a more typical climatological upper air pattern for as we near February. I'm gaining some confidence that we might start making some progress in offsetting the drought in the next 30 days. We have quite a ways to go though.