Did The Deluge Dampen Our Drought?
By Molly Daly
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - When it's all tallied up, we'll have gotten as much as three inches of rain this weekend, but is it enough to help solve our water shortage?
"For Philadelphia, for the last 90 days, we're running about 6 inches below normal, and that's pretty significant."
National Weather Service Meteorologist Jim Hayes says, although this rainfall is welcome, it's not necessarily going to fill out our precipitation account.
"What's happening is the ground gets kind of hard, because it's been dried out. It's not as though we've been baking in the sun in July in the 90's -- that type of dry, but it's going to take some time for some of this rainfall to percolate into some of the harder ground."
And if it can't percolate, rain runs off, which means a higher risk flooding.
But, Hayes says although we're short a lot of rain -- we're not technically in a drought.
"It's a meteorological drought. What it means is we are running a certain amount of precipitation below normal. It's not a hydrological or agricultural drought -- we're not to that point yet."
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