The heavy rain over the past two weeks has helped ease the drought across the Tennessee Valley and the rest of Alabama.
A lot of us are ready for a break from the rain, but we have had enough rain over the past two weeks to slow our developing drought.
Since last Monday, Huntsville International Airport has reported 3.72" of rain; Muscle Shoals has reported 5.48" of rain; Decatur has reproted 4.09" of rain.
A lot of that rain ran off into the rivers, causing the water levels in the rivers to rise.
Some minor flooding has occurred because of that runoff.
The lowest two levels of drought are still present across the Tennessee Valley.
Abnormally dry conditions are reported across the Shoals.
Moderate drought conditions are reported from Huntsville and Athens to Sand Mountains.
More rain over the next week will help eat away at the drought little by little.
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Recent repetitive rainfall revamped drought-stricken South Carolina.
The majority of Saluda and Kershaw Counties are no longer in drought, but pockets in the southern portions of the counties remain.
Earlier in the month, the USDM, downgraded the northern Midlands from the second to first stage of drought.
A week before that, many of the areas currently in drought, were upgraded.
As South Carolina moves into the growing season, rainfall is important for water and soil recharge.
Mother nature is forecast to provide precipitation potential beginning Friday night and lasting off-and-on through late next week.
"To bust the drought, you need consistent, plentiful rainfall," says SkyWACH Meteorologist Justin Kier.
In late December, a string of rain events briefly improved conditions, but without much rain since then conditions have gone downhill.
It’s also important to note that this is what is known as recharge season for the state.
The counties were upgraded from normal drought status to incipient, which is known as the first stage of drought.

On hearing that Day Zero just got pushed back a couple of months, the casual news consumer might be forgiven for confusing this with a bulletin from the Doomsday Clock scientists who predict the likelihood of worldwide nuclear devastation.
But no, that metaphorical clock is still set at two minutes to midnight.
Day Zero is the coming time when Cape Town, South Africa will essentially run out of municipal water for its 4 million residents — and for the visitors, too, who have long flocked to the beautiful, cosmopolitan city with a Mediterranean climate startlingly like our own.
Thanks to climate change, the annual rainfall there — never a huge amount in the first place — has diminished sharply in recent decades.
But there has been plenty of political bungling, too, and a remarkably short-sighted inability of local, regional and national government agencies to use engineering innovation to lessen the parched blow to people and to agriculture.
There are lessons for sure for Southern Californians to learn from this looming dry-as-dust scenario on the other side of the world.
The good news is that the predicted Day Zero was pushed back from sometime in April to sometime in June precisely because citizen conservation efforts are paying off.
But those efforts are pretty awful to ponder for those of us in California who thought last year’s mighty downpours might signal an end rather than an anomalous blip in our drought.
They will have to line up in the streets at just 200 water stations.
So are the days when we can afford to irrigate parkways and golf courses with expensive drinking water.

Jerry Brown lifted California’s drought emergency status a year ago, after a wet winter that snapped a historic 2013-2017 drought, and the state ended his 25 percent mandatory conservation order.
The average residential user in one Malibu water district, for instance, used 255 gallons a day, according to the state water board — three times the U.S. average of 83 gallons per person per day.
Residents of an east Orange County water district used 203 gallons a day.
“I like the lawn,” she said.
Residents of lower-income communities — with much less lawn — are some of the heroes when it comes to keeping water use down.
That includes residents of East Los Angeles, who used an average of 42 gallons a day, and people in Huntington Park, who got by on just 34 gallons.
U.S. drought monitors this month declared parts of Southern California back in severe drought, just months after the state emerged from that category of drought.
A winter of shorts and T-shirts, record warm days, and growing worry over water supply in Southern California are leading California’s Water Resources Control Board to consider next week whether to permanently reinstate some bans on water use that were imposed during the drought state of emergency.
Much of what snow does fall melts in place before spring runoff ever reaches the reservoirs that depend on it.
Water reservoirs are full from last winter’s welcome, near-record rain.

The Rio Grande, a major water source for much of the Southwest, contains just half the water it did during recent drought years.
“The population bloomed, and this year virtually all of them could die,” said Pelz, who noted that a handful of other birds and fishes will be imperiled by a dry winter.
At most survey sites in New Mexico and southern Colorado, snowpack levels were recently logged at less than 25 percent of average.
“If things remain dry, a record-low runoff year is nearly assured,” Goodbody said.
Throughout the Rocky Mountain headwaters of the Colorado River, snowpack levels are 67 percent of the 1980-to-2010 median.
“When that happens, what looks like will be a drier-than-average year can quickly become a very dry year,” she said.
The reservoirs of the Colorado River are seriously depleted, with Lake Powell just 56 percent full and Lake Mead 41 percent full.
Pitt said Lake Mead’s surface elevation has rarely been so low since the reservoir was first filling with water during World War II.
Lake Shasta, the state’s biggest reservoir, is three-fourths full.
“But forests don’t see a benefit from full reservoirs,” Lund said.

There were still weeks to go in the wet season and the reservoirs were full, thanks to last winter’s near record-breaking rain and snow.
“The outlook isn’t good,” said David Rizzardo, chief of snow surveys with the Department of Water Resources.
Sacramento has seen 7.8 inches of rainfall – 50 percent of average.
Jerry Brown declared an end to the five-year drought last April, but most climatologists and forecasters say drought-like conditions have returned.
“We’re in a ‘little D’ drought, or at the beginning of a ‘little D’ drought,” said Michelle Mead of the National Weather Service in Sacramento.
What’s preventing a “big D” drought – where dramatic conservation measures are ordered?
It’s partly the state’s reservoirs, most of which are at their historic averages because of last winter’s record rains.
Notably, Sacramento allows just one day a week of outdoor watering in winter.
Related stories from Sacramento Bee Sierra Nevada snow picture brightens, but is still just a fraction of normal Specter of drought looms as California’s weather turns dry again Why millions of dead trees in the Sierra may have helped save water during the drought Hanak said she expects some communities to impose other water-reducing measures and “do some belt-tightening” this summer.
“One real concern of climate change is just this constant back and forth on the extremes.

It appears citizens are largely heeding the call to “beat Day Zero”, the date reservoirs are expected to have shrunk so low authorities will have to shut off taps in the city’s homes, forcing people to line-up for water at 200 collection points.
At the start of February, the city asked residents to use only 50 litres or less each per day, and provided an online water calculator to help people work out how to do that.
The coastal city of about 4 million people has now cut its consumption to 526 million litres per day, about half the more than 1 billion litres used two years ago, Neilson noted.
“If we continue to work as a team to lower our consumption to 450 million litres per day, as required, we will become known as one of the most resilient cities in the world,” he said.
“It is going be a part of what we term the new normal,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding that other municipalities in South Africa would need to conserve water too.
Councilor Limberg said water was a basic human right, and local government had a responsibility “to ensure access”.
He and others said the central government had been too slow to declare the water situation in the Western Cape a national disaster – a move it finally made on Tuesday.
“The political squabbling has resulted in paralysis of responses and planning to deal with the water crisis,” said Mavhinga of Human Rights Watch.
“There is knowledge in South Africa on the ground level, but it comes down to politicians who have to put the stamp of approval on these things,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation after visiting Cape Town.
Councilor Limberg said Cape Town had suffered from unreliable weather, which was out of line with predictions by the South African meteorological services and related to global warming.

The National Disaster Management Centre has taken over management of the crisis, its deputy director general, Dr Mmaphaka Tau, said in a statement.
In January, Western Cape premier Helen Zille wrote to the government calling for the drought to be declared a national disaster when it became apparent that “Day Zero” – when Cape Town is forced to turn off residents’ taps due to a lack of water supply — was a likely reality.
At the time, Cape Town officials had warned that the combination of the unprecedented drought and unsustainable water consumption meant that the city’s six feeder dams would reach unusable levels by April 12th.
The latest data from Cape Town officials shows that the city’s six feeder dams were on average 24.9 per cent full as of February 13th.
If Day Zero arrives, up to 2 million Cape Town residents will have to queue at 200 designated points about the city for a daily quota of 25 litres of water.
Last week the city’s residents used an average of 526 million litres of water per day, which remains above the target of 450 million litres, but is an improvement on recent weeks.
In its efforts to avoid Day Zero, city officials have introduced several “demand management” techniques to help reduce water usage.
Three desalination plants that will add approximately 16 million litres of water per day into the system by May are also currently under construction.
Scientists blame the water shortages on the changing climate, which is bringing rainfall to the city later than usual and making it drop more erratically.
However, poor water infrastructure and a failure by local governments to respond quickly enough to the worsening crisis have also played a part.

Maputo — On Wednesday, Mozambique authorities introduced water rationing to more than a million residents in the capital Maputo due to a severe drought.
The city is cutting the water supply to consumers to just 40% of normal levels, Casimiro Abreu, deputy director of the country’s national emergency centre said in a statement.
About 1.3 million people in Maputo and its surroundings are affected by the restrictions, raising fears of disease outbreaks.
"Diarrhoeal diseases including cholera are likely to occur in some neighbourhoods where populations will resort to unsafe sources," said Abreu.
Low rainfall over the past three years has left a dam that supplies the city with most of its water at just 19% capacity.
Meteorologists forecast that the region will receive below-normal rains during the first three months of this year.
Southern Africa has experienced a severe drought in recent years, aggravated by the El Niño weather phenomenon.
Cape Town faces the prospect of having to turn its taps off in early June and now restricts residents to 50 litres of water a day, with SA declaring the drought a national disaster.

TUCSON – While relief is on the way for a parched Sonoran Desert, a lot more is needed to wipe out the expanding Arizona drought.
According to 4WARN Meteorologist Jeff Beamish, most of Metro Tucson can expect 0.30-0.75” rain through Friday.
Isolated areas in the Old Pueblo may pick up an inch, while Santa Cruz and Cochise Counties may receive up to 1.5” rainfall.
Since the start of the year, Tucson was running a rainfall deficit over 1.30”.
Dating back to October 1st, that deficit balloons to over 3”.
After a record wet July, Tucson’s rainfall is a whopping 5.04” below normal.
Even more staggering is the amount of rain needed to break out of the drought before wildfire season begins in April.
According to NOAA, southern Arizona needs roughly 8” of rainfall to eliminate the ongoing drought.
Tucson’s average March rainfall is 0.73”.
In a severe drought, every drop of rain certainly helps.