Ticker for January 22, 2009

                
MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ...
January 22, 2009   January 22, 2009   January 22, 2009   January 22, 2009



Variations on a Dry Theme, with Veins and Veils

Yesterday's Ticker included two maps which show the number of days
since significant rainfall. That Ticker generated a heavy response,
so we want to remind you that those maps are updated every day on
the Ticker home page:

http://ticker.mesonet.org/

Today's Ticker builds on several questions we received by email.
Most of them were of this vein:
"Ticker, thanks for the map, but can you tell us how common or
uncommon these numbers are?"

Another reader commented on our thinly-veiled Johnny Cash reference
(Veiled? Get it? We slay ourselves.)

Anyway, to address the first question, we made some time-series
traces from five Oklahoma Mesonet stations. These are intended to help
put the current streak in perspective. Each time series starts with
January 1994 on the left, and ends with today on the right:







The blue trace shows the number of consecutive calendar days that
received less than 1/4 inch of rain. When more than 1/4 inch of rain
fell on a single day, the graph crashes back to zero.

The current streak, in number of days, in purple on the right-hand side.
We've also picked out some of the "biggies" for each station and noted
them in red. You'll notice that Burneyville's current 108-day streak
is the longest such streak in its 15-year history.

You can also see, very interestingly, that these "rainless streaks"
(or more accurately: "streaks of less than significant rain") rarely
exceed a few weeks in eastern Oklahoma, while longer streaks are much
more common for the panhandle stations and Altus.

One more piece of climate knowledge that jumps off the screen is the
winter rhythm in the panhandle: The Dec-Jan period shows up routinely
on the Boise City graph.