DAYTON — Good afternoon, and happy Wednesday everyone! Weather Specialist Nick Dunn here to talk about drought! We have seemingly talked about this for quite a while now, but I wanted to provide some context into how many gallons of water we need to bring things back to “average” when it comes to rainfall!
[DOWNLOAD: Free Storm Center 7 Weather app for alerts as news breaks]
From August 1st to September 16th, we generally have about 4.75″ of rain, but we are only at 1.54″ in that timeframe. That gives us a deficit of 3.32″ and that number is growing each day we do not have rain.
Now to answer the question...what would it take to bring us back to even? I did some math and I think you will find this quite interesting!
[WATCH Storm Center 7 Weather on the following devices]
To Start - we need the square mileage in our viewing area! That comes out to 7,214 square miles.
Next - We need to know how many gallons of water are in one inch of rain per square mile. That number is 17.4 Million! We take that times 3.2 inches and for one square mile the total gallons needed would be about 57.8 Million...quite impressive but we are not done yet!
Moving On - We then take the roughly 57.8 Million Gallons times 7214 square miles and that brings us to a total of around 417 Billion Gallons of water to fall!
I wanted to compare that number to Olympic size swimming pools. If we factor in that size pool holds 660,000 gallons...we would need about 631,000 Olympic sized swimming pools of water to bring us all back to even! That number increases daily for each day we are dry.
Keep our WHIO Weather app handy so you can follow along with us as we track rain chances increasing for next week!
Sign Up
