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If your lawn is looking a little dried and brown these days here in southeast Minnesota, there's a pretty good reason why.

To say we haven't had a lot of rain in these parts recently is a bit of an understatement. Sure, we've had the occasional scattered shower or storm move through parts of the area (like the one that moved through downtown Rochester around 6 o'clock Friday morning, and there could be more scattered showers and storms this Saturday), but those long, soaking rains haven't been seen much around our neck of the woods lately.

In fact, rainfall totals here in Rah-Rah-Rochester ARE below normal this summer. A post on ABC-6 Chief Meteorologist Chris Kuball's Twitter page pretty confirms things. He says our rainfall so far since July 1st is just under 5 inches. Which doesn't sound too bad...until you compare that with our average total of about 7.2 inches. So, yeah, as you can see in the graphic below, we're about 2.26 inches below where we usually are in rainfall totals.

And our lawn sure looks like it-- while it's not as brown as some open areas in our neighborhood, it's starting to get pretty dry and crunchy. And, watering our gardens has been something on our to-do pretty much every evening, as well-- seeing as we aren't getting any help from Mother Nature.

Now, compare those meager totals to where we were LAST year and things look even more stark. In case you don't recall, last year was incredibly WET here in southeast Minnesota. In fact, 4.9 inches of rain fell at Rochester International Airport on June 28th ALONE last year. And, nearly TWO FEET of rain fell from the beginning of May until mid-August last year, when the total topped out at whopping 39 inches of precipitation for the year through the end of summer.


Listen to Curt St. John from 6 to 10 a.m. on Quick Country 96.5
and from 2 to 6 p.m. on 103.9 The Doc

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