Precipitation in Connecticut

Hot, hot, hot! I was looking over my Viticulture notes and came upon a nice link to a PDF about Precipitation in Connecticut written by David R. Miller, Glenn S. Warner, Fred L. Ogden and Arthur T. DeGaetano. An analysis of rainfall for the last 100 years shows that the mean annual precipitation is about 44.84 inches. The document makes a distinction between hydrological drought and agricultural drought.

• Hydrological droughts occur in Connecticut after prolonged dry spells of three to six months or more.
• Agricultural droughts occur during the growing season and can take place with dry conditions as short as two weeks on some sandy soils.

So, technically, we are not in a drought period at all. Connecticut is divided into 4 precipitation regions and according to this demarcation, our vineyard is located in precipitation region 3:

The next figure shows the probability of occurrence of extreme weather in a 24 hour period based on a weekly distribution. It seems to be right on course since yesterday, we had an early morning thunderstorm followed by a glorious firework display courtesy of Mother Nature in the late evening on the 4th of July.