Ticker for June 9, 2003

                
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June 9, 2003       June 9, 2003       June 9, 2003       June 9, 2003


Timing May Not Be Everything, But It Matters

A quick look at the following map shows that the Boise City Mesonet
station has recorded 4.69" rainfall in the last six months:



That seems like a shockingly low number, and it pales in comparison
to the almost 20 inches observed at many southeastern Oklahoma
stations.  But, like everything worth writing about, there's more
to the story than meets the eye.

When dealing with rainfall, and/or the lack of it, timing is as much
of the equation as total amount.  The panhandle and the southeast are
worlds apart in both categories.  Cimarron County's normal annual
rainfall is about 17 inches, while southeastern Oklahoma typically
sees more than four feet of rainfall in a year.

However, even more significant is the fact that the panhandle, like
much of the southwestern U.S., relies on the coming summer months
for the majority of its annual total.  Southeast Oklahoma behaves
like a hybrid of the southern plains and the Gulf states, so its
monthly rainfall doses are spread more evenly, but with maxima in
the spring and autumn.

The bottom line is this: winter and spring are almost always very
dry in the western panhandle and relatively wet in the southeast.
In fact, that 4.69" is not too shy of the panhandle's normal value
for the period (6.1").  And those 15-20 inch values are well short
of the period's normal values in the southeast (about 28.0").



This concept is validated by the fact that the last 180 days are
among the driest 10 percent on record in the southeast, and just
barely in the driest third in the panhandle.  In other words, even
though southeast Oklahoma has seen three or four times the rainfall
of the western panhandle in the last 180 days, they are laboring
through a more historically significant lack of rainfall.

Hopefully, this message won't belittle the dry situation in the
panhandle, where 2001 and 2002 were quite unkind and many locations
did not share in the rainfall excesses of the mid-to-late 1990s.