Photo: Dakota Santiago/The New York Times/Redux
It’s forecasted to rain over the next few days, which is good news after two months of dryness. But we’re still in a drought warning — the first in over 20 years. Brush fires continue to rage around the Northeast, including in our city’s parks, and our reservoirs are low, low, low. (You can even see the divider wall that is usually submerged in the Central Park reservoir.) Will the incoming downpour help? We reached out to John Homenuk, the meteorologist behind the New York Metro Weather Instagram account, to talk about what a welcome bout of rain means for the region.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Is it really about to rain?
Obviously there’s a lot of attention on the rain because the last 40 to 50 days have just been ridiculously dry. So yeah, we have a storm system coming in and tonight is going to be a frontal boundary where we start to get periods of rain late, around 10 p.m. And the showers will continue overnight for a couple of hours, so it could be raining fairly heavily until about 5 or 6 a.m. It’ll probably quiet down a little bit some time on Thursday, but I expect showers to reinvigorate during the late morning and hang out for most of Thursday. Not necessarily heavy rain, but it’s gonna be kind of a dreary, cooler rainy day, which we haven’t had in a long time. And then the storm wraps up into Friday so it’s really gonna be a couple days of unsettled conditions.
Should we be celebrating?
Well, it’s hard to celebrate this kind of weather because it stinks. But I think that the drought has gotten really bad for so many people and for so long that I think there’s some reason to celebrate because we really do need this rain for sure.
This will help with brush fires I assume.
For the most part, this is about as good of news as you can ask for. One important piece of context is that drought is a long-term thing — it builds up over 30, 60, 90-plus days — so this isn’t gonna solve all of our problems right away. But it will be a good start and it puts a dent in the deficit that we have. It’s definitely complex, right? The soil is so dry so this won’t completely help — for instance, if it rained and then we went right back to dryness for a long period of time, we’d go right back to having the same problem.
Will it help our reservoir reserves upstate?
So the reservoir deficits and the long-term drought, they don’t get solved with one storm. But this will put a dent in it. This is a pretty big storm, so it’s affecting pretty much everyone from Pennsylvania through New England.
From what you can tell, will it return to being dry in the coming months?
I think that the worst of it is probably over based on what we were looking at. It looks to me like we’re going into a more active pattern. It might not be immediate, where we’re getting days and days of rain, but there should at least be multiple opportunities for rain coming in the next couple of weeks.
That sounds pretty good.
Obviously it’s not great right now and we don’t have much room for error, but most of the model data that we see moving forward is definitely looking better and it looks like the pattern will stay active into December. So that’s about as good as you could ask for.
If it’s going to be “bad” weather but we desperately need rain, how do you rate these kinds of days on your Instagram?
I’ve had this debate. I think the value of the weather rating is in it being for what it’s like outside. So I’ve decided to separate the two because if I start doing this then it’s like, Oh, we really like a snowstorm, so that should be a 10 out of 10 too. And I don’t wanna open that door. It can be crappy and still have a benefit.
That makes sense. And as someone who really likes a snowstorm, do you think it will finally snow this winter?
Yeah, I think we’ll have several chances, honestly. I expect the winter to be warmer on average, but I think there will be more chances for bigger snowstorms this year, so it’s gonna be fun. I’m gonna be very busy. If you like snow, stay tuned.
