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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Dolly or Not, Area's Likely To Stay Wet

By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
       Don't count on Hurricane Dolly to bring more moisture to the Albuquerque area.
    But Dolly or not, our rainy weather appears likely to stay awhile.
    Dolly, expected to come ashore around Brownsville, Texas, at midday today, probably will play itself out in northern Mexico, according to the National Weather Service.
    Meanwhile, New Mexico's summer rains — after an extraordinarily dry late winter and spring — have kicked in with a vengeance, wiping out the rainfall deficit and reducing drought conditions in the Albuquerque area and around much of the state, according to Ed Polasko, who tracks New Mexico drought for the Weather Service.
    The summer rains — our monsoon — crept into New Mexico in late June, and it has been raining ever since.
    "The monsoon moisture is doing what it's supposed to do," Polasko said Tuesday.
    In Albuquerque, the official rainfall total at the Weather Service's airport station was 2.09 inches since July 1. The usual spotty monsoon pattern has left amounts varying from less than an inch to more than 3 inches around the metro area, according to reports collected by the volunteers in the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network.
    The heaviest rain has come in southern New Mexico, where weather stations in the Deming and Silver City area have recorded 5 to 8 inches since July 1.
    With New Mexico air already thick with monsoon moisture, there remains an outside chance that Dolly will bring more, according to the Weather Service. Computer models used to forecast the storm's track as it leaves the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and crosses into Texas and Mexico are uncertain. In general, they suggest the storm will track to our south, across northern Mexico. But the simulations leave open a slim chance that Dolly's moisture could stream up the Rio Grande Valley and into southern New Mexico by late in the week.
    Even without Dolly, the forecast calls for no letup in the rains for at least the next week. "It doesn't look like it's going to quit," Polasko said.