Tag: west michigan

Yesterday We Expected Widespread Heavy Rainfall During the Late Afternoon and into Early This Morning. We also expected a slight chance of severe storms. As it turned out the rainfall forecast was very much on track as most of southern and central Lower Michigan had 2 to 4 inches of rain. There was a report of tornado near Colon Michigan at 11:06 pm. There were also several reports of wind damage, mostly south of I-96.

Heavy rain with localized flooding occurred over southern and central Lower Michigan on the evening of the 12th of July. There were also reports of damaging winds, a tornado near Colon and a few funnel cloud reports.

We are expecting heavy rain late this afternoon into early tonight across the southern half of Lower Michigan.

Heavy rain with a few thunderstorms is expected over the southern 1/3 of Lower Michigan from late afternoon until early Thursday morning. Rainfall amounts of 2″ to 4″ is expected over a large area, so that may cause some urban and small stream flooding.

The heaviest rainfall is expected between 5 pm and 9 pm this evening. Rainfall of 2 inches to 4 inches is expected with local amounts over 5 inches possible. As a result, The National Weather Service has issued a Flood Watch for the southern 1/3 of Lower Michigan until 2 am Thursday. This amount of rain will have an impact on reducing the on-going drought if in fact we actually do that that much rain over a large area.

Over the Great Lakes and Midwest, our Drought continues. There has been beneficial rainfall over some of the area, during the past week, but this has not been enough to really end the on-going drought. Above normal rainfall is expected over some of this area in the next two weeks but even that will likely not end the drought. It will however help some.

Recent rainfall has helped our drought improve some, but with rainfall anomalies being between 4 and 7 inches over the past 3 months, that has not come close to ending our current drought.

I wanted to add more depth to what I wrote yesterday. The question I want to address is how much rain do we actually need to end this drought? You may be supersized by how much rain it would take!

To end our current drought over southern Michigan we would need around 6 inches of rain by the end of July. This is near record totals for July at most of our climate sites. It would seem unlikely given our current weather pattern we would get that much widespread rainfall. So while we do expect more rain in the next month than the previous month, the expected rainfall will likely fall short of ending this drought.

After nearly 2 months of very limited rainfall, our area (Southwest Michigan) finally had around an inch of rain between the 25th and 26th of June. My blog below will look at the impact of that on our drought and the forecast going forward for the next 2 week to see if we will have a mitigation of our current drought.

Our current drought and it’s impacts continue across Michigan, this blog looks at what is happening now and then what we should expect going forward into mid July.

Rain is on the way for Sunday into Tuesday, this will help our developing drought over Lower Michigan but it likely will not be enough to end it.

It’s been unusually dry is Lower Michigan since early May, this is expected to change by Sunday.

A Very Dry May is Expected to be Followed by a Not all the Wet June over Southern Lower Michigan (at least through mid June)

May in Southwest Michigan was one of the top 10 driest on Record, the fist half of June is not expected to be all that much wetter.