Elsa, Fred and Henri bring a wet summer
We’ve met Elsa, Fred & Henri.
Next? Julian? Ida? Odette? Maybe, even Victor or Wanda?
It’s too early to say when or even if another tropical storm, or its soggy remnants will hit Connecticut this year.
But the three that have hit the state — Elsa in July, Fred and Henri in August — have helped produce something we don’t usually see at summer’s end. Rivers and streams do not lack for water. Groundwater supplies are holding their own instead of drying up.
“They are definitely high,” said John Mullaney, a hydrologist at the US Geological Survey’s New England Water Science Center in East Hartford.
“It’s been a very wet summer,” said Michael Jastremski, watershed conservation director for the Housatonic Valley Association, based in Cornwall.
Data collected by volunteers with the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network in the state bear that out. After a wet July, Henri’s soaking gave towns in northern Fairfield and Litchfield Counties a 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch soaking.
“It was a pretty good rainfall in two days,” said Matt Spies of Brookfield, CoCoRaHS state coordinator.
Add that to Fred’s downpours a few days earlier, and western Connecticut got between 5 and 6 inches of rain by Aug. 24, with even more falling in the northeast towns of Litchfield County.
The rule of thumb is that the state gets about 4 inches of precipitation a month. So, following a drenched July, we’ve had a sodden August as well.
“We’ve been wet in the beginning of July and the last two weeks of August,” Spies said.
Henri’s odd path contributed to last week’s soaking.
After making landfall as a tropical storm in Rhode Island, it veered to the northwest, crossing Connecticut diagonally from Stonington to Salisbury. Out of state, it moped around, flooding towns in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Then its remnants headed back to cross Connecticut again, but from the opposite direction.
Gary Lessor, director of The Weather Center at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, said when Henri hit Rhode Island, it was blocked by a strong high pressure system to the north. So rather than heading up the Connecticut-Rhode Island line, its counter-clockwise winds made it take a sharp left.
“It’s not often that something like that happens,’’ Lessor said.
Once in New York, the remnants of the storm got swallowed up by an upperlevel low pressure system heading east from the Great Lakes, said Bill Jacquemin, senior meteorologist at The Connecticut Weather Center in Danbury. That carried Henri’s soppy left-overs back to us.
“It’s like what it did with Fred,” Jacquemin said of
Data collected by volunteers with the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network in the state bear that out. After a wet July, Henri’s soaking gave towns in northern Fairfield and Litchfield Counties a 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch soaking.
how the remnants of that storm gurgled back into Connecticut. “It’s a victim of the jet stream.”
All the rain, combined with what fell in July, have helped replenish the state’s groundwater supplies.
The USGS’s Mullaney said that in summer, growing trees, grass and plants all suck water out of the earth to stay alive. So the usual cycle is for groundwater reserves to grow over the winter and spring, peaking in May. Then, they decline over the summer, only to start rising in October after the first frost ends the growing season.
Thanks to this wet summer, he said, groundwater supplies have held their own. Monitoring wells in Newtown, Southbury and Greenwich all show supplies exceeding the levels of droughty August 2020.
Likewise, the HVA’s Jastremski said, the rivers and brooks in western Connecticut haven’t hit their normal lows.
“We had flows that were much higher than in July,” he said.
Jastremski said rivers and streams with a good flow of cool water means the eastern brook trout — which like cool water — can thrive. They are indicator species, he said. If they’re doing well, so are other fish, insects and freshwater mollusks.
Too much water, however, and you get flooding and erosion, which can damage river habitats. So far, Jastremski said, the rain in western Connecticut hasn’t over topped any banks.
However, Alicea Charamut, executive director of the Rivers Alliance of Connecticut, based in Litchfield, said heavy rains aren’t all wonderful.
They wash a lot of pollution into the rivers and streams — nitrogen and potassium from fertilizers, animal waste and roadway
oil and grease. If storm sewers connect to sewage treatment plants, storm runoff can dump untreated sewage into the world as well.
“But I don’t want to
sound ungrateful,” Charamut said. “Compared to a scary drought, I’ll take this any day.”