6-3 IAN Rain

 I don’t know whether I should think of myself as an optimist, or just a short-term thinker. Rain is on my mind.

 The recent spate of rainstorms have certainly interfered with my golfing and tennis outings but when you think about the fact that agriculture relies so much on precipitation, what’s in a game? The important thing, after all, is irrigating Idaho’s crops in the face of dry weather around the country. So I just had to know and called Phil Morrisey, hydrologist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. “Is the recent rain enough to help our crops? I have not analyzed the whole state picture but it does not seem like the kind of overwhelming, persistent rain that really can make a lot of difference. It might make a temporary difference for a few days but unless it gets to really pouring down some rain, I think this light rain is not adding much up in the mountains on the snowpack. Last week North Idaho up in the Panhandle 1 to 2 inches out of it but we really didn’t see those kinds of amounts. That’s what it would take would be a couple of inches  of precipitation to make a dent. I think we are seeing  scattered widespread  precipitation events rather than a solid front.