Ticker for April 22, 2026

                
MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ...
April 22, 2026     April 22, 2026     April 22, 2026     April 22, 2026


More  yams, please




Remember Thanksgiving? Ahhh, the family get-togethers, the turkey, the mashed
potatoes and cranberry sauce, the Cherry Pop-Tart casserole (hey, you do you)
...the thankfulness that we weren't about to experience the warmest and one of
the driest winters on record.

Well we saw how that worked out!

But if you're looking for the last good rain in parts of the Oklahoma Panhandle,
you have to go back to Nov. 20, when Hooker had a whopping 0.28 inches of rain
and Eva one-upped them with 0.32 inches. Boise City snuck in ahead of them with
0.26 inches on Nov. 23, but you're seeing the problem here.

And it ain't just my grammar!

We can take a partial look back at just the last 120 days to see just how dry
it has been out that way, and at least how some parts of the state have begun
to recover with recent moisture.









Now why am I writing about this? Because we're about to go into another active
weather pattern with the possibility of more severe weather, and the rain that
goes along with it. And the chance for that severe weather starts today in
that area of the Panhandle where they were thawing out the turkey the last time
they had a good rain.



Here's the weird thing though..whilst there's a chance of storms out that way
today, the rainfall forecast for the next 5 days shows NO accumulation out
there.



And just like when John McClain killed that mercenary in Dulles Airport right
before Christmas that told him somebody was about to seriously mess with that
airport, that rainfall forecast tells me that there's not really a good chance
for those storms today, or that they'll be isolated at best.

Why bring a Christmas movie analogy into a Thanksgiving themed Ticker? Well what
did you expect...an Independence Day reference??

And as we look at the risk maps through Sunday, remember that these things
can and probably WILL change as we go through the next few days.









We'll see how this plays out. At the least, it doesn't appear likely we're
going to break the significant rainless streak in the Panhandle. At least not
this week, and maybe the next.

Gary McManus
State Climatologist
Oklahoma Mesonet
Oklahoma Climate Survey
gmcmanus@ou.edu