Almost everyone knows that if you move or wash your car or meteorologists have an outdoor picnic or any number of other activities, you seem to insure rain. So with the dryness in the extreme category, maybe we should go out this afternoon and wash our cars to generate some rain. Maybe while some are washing their cars, others will perform an age old rain dance – surely that has got to get us some rain!!
Our current forecast is not very optimistic on the subject of rain. At last check, isolated showers were in the forecast for the last three days of May. Any rain will help, but isolated showers just won’t cut it. So what if we do get some isolated showers but NONE of them occur over the Birmingham airport, site of official weather observations for Central Alabama since the late 1800s? If that occurs, current weather records indicate that May, 2007, would be the fifth driest May on record with a monthly total of 1.08 inches.
Drier months include May, 1898, with 0.11″, May, 1936, with 0.65″, May, 2000, with 0.88″, and May, 1941, with 1.05″. Should an isolated shower occur over the airport site, the records show that places sixth through tenth are tightly clustered between 1.15″ and 1.26″ – which means that just about any rain before June 1 would throw the current month out of the top ten driest Mays.
In researching this dryness, I was amazed to find that on 25 separate months in Birmingham, the monthly rainfall has been one half inch or less. The driest month was September, 1927, with only 0.03″ of rain. I think it’s safe to say that no tropical systems affected Central Alabama that year.
Maybe that weak upper air disturbance that has helped to generate so much rain for Texas will defy prediction and slide eastward into Mississippi or West Alabama and bring several days of showers. Then again, maybe not and May, 2007, will forever go into the dry column in the record book!
Wishing for rain and washing my car,
-Brian-
