Got just over an inch in Durant yesterday, it was truly wonderful. Rained for two+ hours in the morning.

We got .5" south of Ft. Smith night before last.

It looks like it could be raining on Dawn right now.

kfrinkle, I'm so happy for you! I was all congratulatory when the panhandles kept getting hit.. and even hit hard in some place. But the South was still suffering.

Amy, Mesonet shows about an inch in Burnseyville in Love Co. Better than nothing! At least the cloud cover gives everything a breather.

Larry, I'm not surprised you're covered up in weeds since the drought monitor shows your soil is only abnormal.

I'm excited even though payne county is smack dab in the middle of red. Must be the wind.

Oklahoma Drought Monitor as of This Morning

Amy was right. It was raining on us.

We have had on-and-off rain for almost 48 hours, although the first two "rain showers" dropped such a fine mist that you had to stand still in the yard and try really hard to feel it because you really couldn't even see it and it wasn't reaching the ground. Tim called it mist or light rain. I called it virga or maybe high humidity. We have had a lot of virga this year, and it drives me up the wall. After those first two rain showers, our rain gauge still was as dry as a bone.

We had good rain (we've been so dry that anything that hits the ground is good rain, even if there isn't much of it) yesterday morning and heavier rain overnight and this morning. It ended around noon, though a lot of it after about 9 or 10 a.m. was just light, misty stuff. A little after 1 am we had a thunderstorm with tons of thunder and lightning. One nearby lightning strike was incredibly loud and woke us up, but it still was lovely to listen to the sound of raindrops on the rooftop.

All that rain finally added up to 1.55" in our rain gauges in the front and back gardens, and we have wet grass and puddles in the driveway. I'm thrilled.

Of course, the rain ruined all my plans. I wanted to harvest yesterday, but it rained all morning so I canned much of the harvest from Monday (I canned from around 4:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.) and said I'd harvest today. Today it rained all morning so I got busy doing other stuff, and now it is too hot and too muggy to go out and harvest. So, I'll go out early tomorrow morning and harvest, and then I can spend the whole weekend canning the harvest.

Bon, We're still in Extreme Drought as well, and our county's mesonet station has recorded quite a bit more rain this year than we've had at our place. This rainfall this week was very welcome. I had watered the garden twice in the last week, heavily both times and was dreading the water bill that would result, and still the garden wilted every day---including wilting on the day after I watered. It is just too hot and windy for the irrigation to be enough. Without rainfall, I think my garden will die. So, today's rainfall should be enough to keep it alive another week or so. It also will help prevent us from progressing from Extreme to Exceptional Drought.

As of the end of June, we have had less rainfall for the Jan-June period than we had in the awful, hot, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year of 2011.....and less rainfall for that period than we had in 2003, when our rainfall for the entire year was a little under 19". Today's rainfall should push our year-to-date rainfall ahead of at least 2011's, though maybe not 2003's. Our temperatures this year are very similar to 2003's so the heat is not nearly as bad as it was in 2011. I'm hoping for great rainfall in July to continue. Even one decent rainfall per week will be the difference in whether the garden produces well or if it just barely clings to life with irrigation but doesn't produce well. Irrigation can only carry a garden so far.

There's a 4" plant available water feature on one of the Mesonet rainfall map pages. Essentially, if your number on that map is less than 0.50, you should be watering. Our number has been around 0.25 to 0.28 for almost all of June and July---even after we had 3.5" of rain over a 2-day period in June it never even made it back to 0.50. I've tried to avoid looking at that map because it is just depressing. I water the bare minimum I can get away with watering because it doesn't do the plants any good if I water very heavily and push them into producing a lot of thick, lush growth that then will demand more and more and more water. Usually by the time we hit Extreme Drought, I stop watering and let most of the garden just die, but we usually don't hit Extreme Drought until later in the summer. I am not ready to give up on the garden yet this year, but the day is coming where I'll pull the plug on watering. If enough rain falls, maybe I won't have to do that. This week's rain is great right now, but in the heat next week, it will dry up very quickly and we'll be back to looking like we're in drought (which we are). After yesterday's rain, our Mesonet station made it up to 0.44 so I think that after today's rainfall, we've be above 0.50 for the first time in a long time, but I also think it won't last long.

How dry is it? Even the crabgrass leaves were rolling up and I was starting to think/hope the crabgrass was going to die. Now that rain has fallen, I am sure the crabgrass will continue on its quest for world domination.
Dawn

We are just a few miles up the road from Dawn, and our total for all the days of rain was only .68". Things look beautiful right now, but it's not going to last long.

Flis

Wow, I thought y'all would get more. Tim and Chris were buying lumber at the Lowe's in Ardmore the other night when Ardmore got rain the day before we did and they got trapped there by the rain. They sat around the store about an hour so they wouldn't get the lumber wet driving home. You are so much closer to Ardmore than I am that I thought you might have gotten a lot more rain than we did. I hope you get more soon. You're right---no matter how much fell this week, by next week everything will start browning out and wilting and we'll be wishing for more rain.