Thanks to an influx of rain this spring, Philly is finally out of a drought that lasted eight months.
The U.S. Drought Monitor classified the city as being in abnormally dry conditions or worse from September until its most recent weekly report, released Thursday. After a record-long dry spell in the fall that lasted 42 straight days, the area has struggled to get groundwater, reservoirs and rivers back to normal levels.
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Rocky Bilotta, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who helped create the report, said the city is likely to stay out of a drought for a while, too, citing a number of components on top of rainfall that go into the designation.
"It's not like the following week, if it's below normal precipitation, you're going to slingshot right back into abnormal dryness," Bilotta said. "It really takes a lot of factors, not just precipitation, but the heat, evapotranspiration, and other factors really decide whether or not you're going to swing back into abnormal dryness quickly."
Rainfall totals have creeped closer to the city's average after one of the driest Januarys in decades had less than 1 inch of precipitation, according to National Weather Service data. Since 2000, Philly has averaged about 13.5 inches of rain over the first four months of the year. After a particularly wet March, the city entered May less than 2.5 inches shy of that mark.
"As those numbers show, we're almost back to where we should be, rainfall wise, since the beginning of the calendar year," NWS Hydrologist Ray Kruzdlo said. "So that's a good thing as we go into the summer."
Water consumption is typically higher in the hotter months as people fill their pools, water plants and try to keep lawns green. The spring rain has been gradual and continuous, edging the area out of a drought bit by bit, as opposed to a large, "drought buster" storm that can cause flooding, Kruzdlo said.
"Nobody wants to deal with that and see those impacts, I don't wish that upon anybody," he said. "So the fact that we're doing this slowly, and we're minimizing the impacts, is a good thing."
While Philly is trending in the right direction, in nearby New Jersey counties portions of Camden and Burlington, most of Gloucester and Cape May, and all of Salem, Cumberland and Atlantic remained in abnormally dry conditions. In the Philly suburbs, parts of Chester and Montgomery counties are still in a moderate to severe drought, and a small portion of Bucks County is still abnormally dry.
Wet conditions are likely to continue in the coming days, with a chance of rain in the forecast for Friday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the NWS.
"If the areas build up a surplus and maintain normal conditions, that will obviously make it difficult for it to move back into a drought or abnormally dry category," Bilotta said.