Drought Update

April has started off very wet for most of Wisconsin including Milwaukee. Most of this rain fell last week centered around April 9th. During that time period over 3.50\" of rain fell. The month to date rainfall for Milwaukee is already over 4\". For comparison, during an average April Milwaukee picks up 3.56\", so even though we are only halfway through April we've already seen more rainfall than we normal see for the full 30 days.

With all of this rain, you may have expected some drought improvement. Unfortunately, this is not the case for southeastern Wisconsin. The wet start to the month has definitely helped our drought situation but more rain is needed to overcome a dry start to 2015. April's rain has improved the dry conditions across the west central part of the state where they have returned to normal conditions and the rain has also shrunk the size of moderate drought over the northern part of the state.

After a dry weekend, we are approaching a wet start to next week. Beyond that, the 8-14 day outlook is forecasting below-average precipitation.

Meteorologist Justin Thompson-Gee