The beat just keeps going on weather wise out there, as we're enjoying another fabulous day with highs near 70 and relatively light winds. Of course we're talked quite a bit about the dry weather of late, and September will go down as the driest month of the entire year with about 1.14". this will be the driest since last DEC when we had a paltry .52". The dry spell that we're going through will continue for about another week before the rain chances start to go up heading towards next FRI-SAT.

For MO the dry spell is turning into a drought for areas south of KC proper...take a look.

Moderate drought is now creeping up towards southern Cass county and Severe drought is now becoming more entrenched across Vernon county and points southwards.

Meanwhile on the KS side...the latest information is certainly grimmer as an extreme-exceptional drought is continuiing across the southern parts of the state with moderate drought conditions spreading up into the far SW corner of Johnson county.

One look at the rainfall over the past 30 days certainly helps to confirm this...take a look at the latest rainfall compared to normal.

All that RED you see represents rainfall that is 50% or worse of average for the previous 30 days. Now if we extend this out to the last 60 days here are the results.

Now lets go out the last 90 days and again notice where the RED coloring is...

Interesting as well to see the changes occurring towards NW MO as well as SE NE/SW IA...where the excessive rainfall has been replaced over the past 30 days by a drier period. this has allowed the flood waters to recede at a somewhat faster rate than anticipated.

Just for giggles here is the year summary so far...

Meanwhile lets contrast that to whats going on across the northeastern part of the country...

The purpleish color represents precipitation in excess of 150% of average.

We touched on Ophelia a bit yesterday, it strengthened quite a bit over the past 24 hours and is, as of this writing a major hurricane with winds of 115 MPH...the eye is very vividly seen on the latest IR satellite picture...

Ophelia will pass off towards the east of Bermuda but will threaten and become an issue for Nova Scotia later Sunday night into Monday morning. It should be a close call for the SE coast of Canada.

GFS and it's ensembles still bring the rain here on FRI...EURO really never gets the rain here at all until potentially a week from Monday...we continue to discount the EURO operational run, at this point we feel that it's typical model error of keeping to much energy held back into the SW part of the country is again on display.

Oh and don't be surprised if I talk about a bit of snow over the weekend...no not here, but out towards the higher elevations of the Mid Atlantic states, especially WV/MD/PA.

That's it for today...not too sure what I'll blog about over the weekend...I'll see if I can come up with anything.

Joe