#Current rainfall totals asheville nc plus#

'The sea surface temperature patterns can influence the large-scale atmospheric circulation - e.g. More: Answer Man: Feral hogs roaming the mountains, or just domesticated pigs on the lam?īut Easterling had more. 'The Southern Oscillation part refers to a see-saw of air pressure in the tropical Western Pacific with high pressure during El Nino and lower pressure during La Nina.' 'The El Nino-Southern Oscillation is a pattern of unusually warm sea surface temperatures for an El Nino, and unusually cold sea surface temperatures (La Nina) for the ocean surface waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific, off the coast of South America,' Easterling said.

#Current rainfall totals asheville nc plus#

'The higher precipitation over the last few years comes from a combination of a few tropical cyclone (hurricane) remnants coming through, plus a series of winter storms/fronts, plus ideal conditions for convection (thunderstorms) in the warm season,' Easterling said. The heavy rains have come from three main sources.

That's why I go to Easterling, an actual scientist. Now, as far as why these rainfall totals have been so high. 'The last three years are not currently included in the calculation of the normal for Asheville, but will be for the next round of normals.'Īs far as the implications of all this heavy rainfall, Easterling said both rainfall and temperature normals 'are used for a lot of applications, like rate-setting for power companies, building design and designing civil engineering structures like dams and culverts.' 'We will be releasing the new normals (1991-2020) next year,' Easterling said. More: Are giant muskie returning to the French Broad? They've been absent from its natural flow Easterling noted the annual normal precipitation for the downtown station, on a 30-year average, is 36.99 inches.Īs far as all the heavy rainfalls of recent years throwing off the normal, Easterling noted NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information calculates those normals every ten years, and the current normal is for the period 1981-2010. While the National Weather Services runs the airport weather station, Easterling's outfit runs the downtown weather station, which sits atop the Grove Arcade. That 2018 deluge was an all-time record, by the way. More: Asheville's 7 biggest December snowfalls on record are nothing to write off 'The Asheville area received only 33.4 inches in 2016, but received 79.48 inches in 2018.' 'Precipitation totals are also highly variable from year to year at any given place, including Asheville,' Easterling said, noting that's because of our mountainous terrain. It's a National Weather Service map, which you can find here: So let's start there.ĭavid Easterling, director of the National Climate Assessment Technical Support Unit, part of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, in Asheville, referred me to a nifty weather map that shows just how dry Asheville is compared to other mountain areas. Real answer: I've addressed Asheville's status as the driest place in the state before, which is ironic considering the amount of beer here, but it's always a fascinating topic.

My answer: I just know this: No matter how hard it's raining, my dogs still want to go for a nice long walk. What's going on with all of the extra water coming down in our area? What are the implications that are coming about because of what appears to be a pattern of change in the weather with a lot of extra moisture? Are the figures from the last three years being built into the annual average amount of precipitation, such that it would show the increase in our area, which I believe historically is one of the drier counties in this area? Are we the driest place in the state? Whether it's on an annual basis or the last three years, that's a lot of water, and we seem to be moving into the deep end of the pool. And if you go back to January 2019 to the present date, I think we've collected an additional five feet of water above the average amount in the last three years. According to data that I have, the average amount of rainfall for Asheville is 45.57 inches annually. I believe this most recent rain put us over 60 inches for the year - which is 5 feet of water - and we still have almost a month left in 2020. Question: When I went out to my mailbox early this morning to get my Citizen Times, once again it was raining. Today’s batch of burning questions, my smart-aleck answers and the real deal: