Moderate drought has been upgraded to severe drought in northwestern Vermont away from Lake Champlain.
The area of the state that is at least abnormally dry is up to 78 percent. Only the far southern two counties of the state and a few pockets of the Connecticut River Valley are OK.
The moderate to severe drought extends across the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
The drought condition snapshot is as things stood on Tuesday. There were scattered showers and thunderstorms across Vermont this morning, some with locally heavy downpours, but this activity was certainly not enough to break the drought. Or even really dent it.
The season is changing, and that tends to bring about changes in weather patterns. That seasonal change from summer to autumn in how storm systems move across Vermont could give us a break, but that's not guaranteed.
We got lucky in the fall of 2016 when we were under a drought even worse than this one. During the height of foliage season that year, we even had some forest fires to block the view of the fall leaves in a few locations.
Later that autumn, rainfall picked up a little, and the following winter proved both rainy and snowy. Which pretty much solved the drought problem. Until this year.
In our immediate future, there's a little hope that we'll get some beneficial rains. An admittably unreliable forecast map from NOAA's Weather Prediction Center anticipates about an inch and half of rain over the next week across the northwestern half of Vermont, where it is the driest.
A storm, partly the remains of Tropical Storm Gordon is expected to come through Monday and Tuesday with a decent slug of rain. But even there, we might have some complications. The Champlain Valley is particularly dry, and the way upper level winds are blowing that area of the state might miss out on the heaviest rain.
We'll have to wait and see on that one.
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