Last month I ran some numbers against that simple chart, Chad. As of April 7, WRAL was saying we were 8.81 inches below normal — but that was over a fifteen month period, all the way back to January 2007.
What it doesn’t show is that we received more rain than normal during six of those months (seven, since we were more than an inch above normal in April).
It doesn’t show that in the six months between October and April we were less than an inch and a quarter below normal, which included a very dry November. April will have made up most of that, too.
It doesn’t show that the last three months of 2007 brought us a half inch more than usual (including the very dry November), nor that March rainfall was 37.2% above average.
Bottom line, unless WRAL adjusts its baseline, things will only be “back to normal” if the rain is 28% above average for the last three quarters of 2008 — 10 inches extra for the entire year. And somehow, I suspect that if ten inches less than normal is a crisis, ten inches more than normal might be a problem somewhere as well.
