Hurricane Helene dumped a record 11 inches of rain on metro Atlanta in late September, but since then the spigot in the sky above the city has been shut off for almost an entire month.
The result? October was one of the driest months in Atlanta’s history, according to the National Weather Service, which has records dating back to 1878.
While a light drizzle that fell Wednesday morning ended the city’s rainless run at 30 days, the moisture was too scarce for monitoring stations to even measure. That means this October could pull even with October 1963 as the city’s driest calendar month on record, according to the NWS.
If Atlanta had made it the entire month without a drop of rain, it would have been a first for the city. Instead, the 30-day dry streak tied the city’s eighth longest on record, the NWS said. Atlanta’s longest spell without rain was a 44-day stretch in October and November of 2016.
It’s normal for Atlanta to see little rain this time of year — historically, October has been the city’s driest month, NWS data show. But elsewhere in Georgia, the weather has been much the same. Macon and Rome have had no measurable rainfall in October, and Columbus has received barely a tenth of an inch.
John Spink/AJC
John Spink/AJC
The exceptional period with little precipitation can be blamed in large part on a stubborn ridge of high pressure that has been stationed over the southeastern U.S. for most of the last several seeks, said Ryan Willis, a NWS meteorologist in Peachtree City.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor map released Thursday showed a major expansion over the last week of land in Georgia considered “abnormally dry.” On Oct. 22, only about 30% of Georgia was in that category. Now, more than 76% of the state is unusually dry.
But on some Georgia farms, the situation is more dire than the weekly drought snapshot depicts, said Lucy Ray, a University of Georgia agriculture and natural resources agent.
Ray said the farmers she works with in Morgan County, about an hour east of Atlanta, have not seen any rain since Helene.
For cotton growers, the dry weather has allowed for an efficient harvest. But for beef and dairy producers, the lack of rain has made it impossible to grow rye grass, oats and other forage crops their livestock graze on in winter, Ray said.
To keep their animals healthy, she said producers are burning through their winter hay stockpiles, which were already meager after a hot, dry June. The longer the drought persists, the more cattle farmers will have to rely on outside feed — instead of their own pastures — to sustain their herds. At minimum, that will dent their profits, but it could force some to make difficult decisions, Ray said.
“Financially, sometimes it makes more sense to either get out of the business or severely cull your herd,” she said. “It’s pretty important for a lot of them to get rain in the next couple of weeks.”
Right now, the chances of that are not great. A Wednesday forecast issued by the Peachtree City office of the NWS predicts the pattern of dry weather and above-normal temperatures will continue at least into early next week.
Longer term, the odds of a shift to wetter conditions aren’t high either. In its winter outlook released earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted Georgia and most of the southern U.S. would likely feel warmer than normal during December to February. The expected switchover to La Nina — a phenomenon triggered by a cooling of waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean — along with the increase in global temperatures from climate change are the main drivers of the forecast.
Dry conditions could also trigger wildfires or limit the use of prescribed burns, which state and local authorities use to control the available supply of fuel for fires in forests and prevent larger, out-of-control infernos.
Wendy Burnett, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Forestry Commission, said there are no statewide burn bans in place but that some counties may be restricting prescribed fires. The commission’s tracker does not show any major fires burning in the state currently, but portions of northeast and southeast Georgia have fire danger ratings from “high” to “extreme.”
Water levels in the main reservoirs in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin — which includes most of metro Atlanta and Lake Lanier, the city’s main water supply — are mostly holding up, for now. Stream flows in parts of northwest Georgia and a few other pockets are “below” or “much below” normal, but conditions across most of the state are normal, a federal drought dashboard for the basin shows.
A note of disclosure
This coverage is supported by a partnership with Green South Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners. You can learn more and support our climate reporting by donating at ajc.com/donate/climate.
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