Photos by Katherine Rountree
Placing all the blame on the rain this past weekend, SCAD officials made a hasty cancellation of the annual Fall Fest, which was to take place Saturday in the SCAD Museum courtyard. Students and faculty alike may be thinking that Savannah’s sunk a few more feet below sea level since last fall, but meteorologists disagree. They insist the numbers are really nothing to be all that concerned about.
“This is not crazy. This is the third year of relatively normal rainfall following six years when we were way below normal,” said John Wetherbee, a meteorologist with Savannah’s WTOC. “We had more than a 10-inch deficit of rain for the last six years.”
The hot summer months of July and August both saw below-average rainfall records this year. Reports for July put Savannah at 1.5 inches below average, and 3.24 inches below for August.
September seems to be making up for that deficit, though, with the month’s average of 4.58 inches having already been surpassed. At the time of this article, researchers had recorded 4.6 inches for September.
Mike Emlaw, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service in Charleston predicts September’s wet trend will not continue.
“We have wet periods and dry periods, and this certainly has been a wet period, but it’s probably not going to continue with that through the rest of the month.”