The last time Lincoln experienced any significant rain — remember rain? — you could still find Halloween candy on the non-discount shelves.
It was Oct. 14, and 0.3 inches of rain fell. It might not have seemed like much compared with the deluge-level start to that month. During the first 10 days of October, almost 4 inches total dropped.
“That’s a lot of water,” said Ken Dewey, a climatologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “And then it stopped.”
This hasn’t been a dry year — it’s actually been wetter than normal, Dewey said. But since that mid-October rain, there’s been barely a drop or flake of precipitation.
Dewey tends to make weather comparisons on month-to-month, season-to-season and year-to-year bases, but a colleague who’s watered his perennials twice this season convinced him to compare the dry run the area’s seen with every other post-Oct. 15 stretch since 1887.
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Turns out your empty bottle of moisturizer is right: It’s the driest such string of days on record.
“This is starting to get more extreme,” said Bill Sorensen, a climate scientist with the High Plains Regional Climate Center at UNL. “It’s an extreme event, is the safest way to say it.”
Lincoln has seen a mere 0.08 inches of precipitation from Oct. 15-Dec. 12. During the second-driest such stretch, Lincoln accumulated 0.23 inches of precipitation in 1976.
Sorensen, who pointed out the record-setting dry spell to Dewey, said that any less than 0.18 inches of precipitation between now and the end of the year will make 2017 drier from Oct. 15 through the end of any other year on record. (Again, 1976 holds the title, with 0.26 inches of precipitation.)
Whether this year sets a 131-year record is still up in the lip-chapping air. Dewey said it’s possible Lincoln will see some snow by Christmas — the National Weather Service calls for chances Thursday and Saturday — but not much of it. Blame La Niña, he said, at least partially.
It’s already a dry time of year, Dewey said, and La Niña, a climate pattern that starts with cooler-than-normal Pacific Ocean water temperatures and goes on to influence weather worldwide, has a tendency to leave the middle of the Midwest drier during winter. Without snow cover, the temperature tends to fluctuate, Dewey said, which you might have noticed.
Sorensen said he first thought to compare this arid stretch with the rest of Lincoln’s years on record when he went outside and saw cracks in his yard. He's been mostly hands-off about it.
“If you’re gonna have two months without rain, this is a time to have it,” he said.
Dewey said he’s seen his neighbors watering their lawns this December, but hasn’t doused his own.
“I don’t think people need to be watering everything,” he said. “It’s dormant.”
Keep an eye on decorative, non-native plants, he said, and brace for lower yields if you grow winter wheat. And be ready for some Arctic air bringing below-normal temps to town by Dec. 22. Whether there's any snow along with them could determine whether this dry winter is a record-setter.