Soaked again: Storms march across Delco and the region
Rainy days and Mondays, Tuesdays and maybe Wednesday.
The best thing that happened this month was when the state declared a drought watch, and Mother Nature has poured it on ever since.
Storms again marched across the region Tuesday afternoon and evening with big totals, and watches and warnings from the National Weather Service in another day full of color for anyone watching the Mount Holly office website homepage. That followed an overnight march of storms.
Some residents in southeastern Pennsylvania might have lost count of the number of rounds of storms in recent days.
Berks County was the first spot in southeastern Pennsylvania to get hit with storms Tuesday afternoon, then Chester County and Delaware County, then Berks again followed by Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties, respectively. And, finally the coastal states.
To start the day, a weather service-issued flood watch took effect for all of southeastern Pennsylvania at noon and was scheduled to run until midnight. The watch also applied to New Castle County, Delaware.
Some of the preliminary daily totals by 7 p.m. Tuesday were Wilmington-New Castle County Airport, 1.38 inches; Philadelphia International Airport, 1.13; Brandywine
Regional Airport, 0.86; and Reading Regional Airport, 0.61.
Those are just the official sites. Those are composites of at least two episodes of storms on Tuesday afternoon. Many other spots saw higher totals.
The same region hit by downpours has been in the target zone for a few days, boosting rain totals and cutting further into precipitation deficits for the year.
The bigger picture
A Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection-issued drought watch remains in effect for the entire state, though plentiful rainfall in the southeast has cut into what was a significant precipitation deficit for 2023 through May.
Delaware, Chester and Berks counties bounced back over the weekend from the 26% to 50% below-normal category to the 11% to 25% category. Montgomery County bounced back on Monday.
The southcentral counties from Fulton to Lancaster remained well within the 26% to 50% category. And it wasn’t a good day there, with York Airport only registering 0.06 inch for Tuesday by 7 p.m. Lancaster faired better at nearly an inch.
Before Tuesday’s storms, at Philly International the rainfall for June was up to 3.17 inches, a few tenths below normal. At Reading Regional, the monthly total was 3.22 inches but that was nearly an inch below normal.
Philly International will no doubt be on the surplus side of normal after Tuesday and Reading near normal. Those totals will be available today.
Normals are fairly high in June because of heavy summer rains in the latter years of last decade. Normal is calculated as the averages of the most recent three completed decades.
The county totals are courtesy of a division of the weather service that incorporates more stations, radar estimates and the watchful eye of a hydrologist. It presents a more accurate picture. The county figures will also be updated today.
Today looks like a carbon copy of Tuesday, the forecast shows, except that after dark a west-northwest flow is expected to take over and drier conditions should end the month, according to the forecast.
With the threat of rain off the table and sunny skies, expect the mercury to reach the mid-to-upper 80s the final two days of the month.
The Mount Holly office announced Tuesday that it declared a tornado had touched down in Northampton County to the east of Allentown near the New Jersey line.
It was considered an EF0 twister with winds of 65 mph, running 3.37 miles at a width of 60 yards, meteorologists said.