For the first time in a long time we had rain on Thursday. The drought has now lasted for three months in our region, and a huge fire in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, continues to burn the forest. It seemed like a good time to consult an expert to get some insight into what’s going on.

NEPM’s Carrie Healy asked UMass Amherst hydrogeologist David Boutt if this rain could impact firefighting efforts in the Berkshires.

David Boutt, UMass Amherst: The precipitation we’re seeing (this week) is really going to help alleviate some of these conditions because the ground is very dry. We have a lot of dry fallen leaves and other dry detritus on the ground due to the growing season. And I think that this particular precipitation will be very helpful, actually, to have some moisture that will reduce the fire risk. So, I think that’s what people are hoping for in terms of reducing the impacts of wildfires. (this will help

Carrie Healy, NEPM: So it’s clearly not enough water to actually put out the fire.

RIGHT. Yeah. But (it will help) in terms of concerns about having additional red flag warnings for fire conditions, in the future.

So how much rain have we actually lost at this point? What do these thumbs look like?

It depends a little on the location. In the Connecticut River Valley, we are looking at a precipitation deficit of about 6 to 7 inches. Some records suggest this is one of the driest consecutive three-month periods we have experienced in our historical instrumental records. Hydrologists call this a soil moisture deficit. (This means that) before water can infiltrate through the soil to reach groundwater and waterways, it must first make up this soil moisture deficit.

We usually don’t have to deal with this deficit because there is always a little humidity inside, right?

Yeah. And generally, as soils dry out, they become less able to absorb that moisture, depending on their clay content. But generally speaking, these are probably the driest soils we’ve had in probably 100 years, maybe since the 1960s, which was the greatest drought on record.

I’ll ask you about that in a moment. We are in the rain. I’m going to open my umbrella. It’s starting to drop a little more. We are supposed to get about an inch of rain during this entire storm. Here in western Massachusetts, is this really going to make a difference?

I think in terms of… new fire hazards, it will. In terms of replenishing the soil water deficit, having water infiltrating into the soil is a start. But we will need many events like this in the future.

Typically, this part of the year in New England is when it starts to get wetter, because during the growing season, plants use a lot of water and evaporate. So we usually start to get those conditions back in what we call the shoulder seasons, when we’re able to move water through the soils, into the ground, which replenishes the aquifers, which replenishes the river flows. water, which leads to higher levels in the soil. spring.

And we’ll need not only events like the one we’re seeing today, but also above-normal precipitation to make up for this significant deficit.

Historically, there was a huge drought in western Massachusetts, in 1962, for what, five years?

Yeah, about five years. We consider this to be the record drought here. This was a multi-year drought, during which at its peak we had two consecutive years of about 25 or 26 inches of precipitation. We normally receive between 45 and 50 inches of precipitation. That’s a reduction of around 50% in precipitation.

This had quite significant consequences in terms of drying up shallow wells. And that actually started the groundwater monitoring program that we currently have and use. Most of the wells we use to track changes in the amount of water in the ground started in the mid-1960s, because people didn’t have that information and were concerned about what was happening.

Am I just hyper focused on the weather? Have you heard people say that this lack of water is a concern?

Yeah, well, I think about it a lot, of course. But I’ve probably been talking to people in the media almost daily for the last 10 days or something.

I think one of the things that people are most concerned about is fires, right? And usually when we have a dry spell or an off-season drought, we don’t talk about it much. The 2016 drought, the 2020 drought, the ’22 drought all took place during the growing season where (we saw) pretty significant impacts on agriculture. During the offseasons, we don’t talk about it much.

So this is the first time in over 20 years here at UMass that I’ve talked about drought and not during the growing season. So yeah, a lot of people say they haven’t really experienced a set of weather conditions like this.