Mariton: Third Quarter Rainfall

by Tim Burris, Preserve Manager

Another quarter has come to a close and it was a wet one. It didn’t start out that way.  The first half of July was relatively dry.  Because the last half of June had been dry, lawns were turning brown.  But then starting   on July 15 things begin to change.  Mariton received 6.10 inches of rain in July.  The average is 5.63 inches.  I’ve said it before, July can be the driest or one of the wettest months.  It just depends on tropical systems and the amount of thunderstorms rolling through.  To give you an idea in 1999, I recorded 0.40 inches of rain for the whole month.  In 2004, I recorded 12.27 inches.

August was really wet thanks in part to a big gully washer. Mariton ended the month with 12.55 inches of rain.  That is a lot of rain, the average for the month is 4.81 inches with a low of 1.42” (2010) and high of 15.45” (2011).

September continued the trend of being wet thanks in part to remnants to Gordon and Florence, and a lot of passing weather fronts. The month ended up with 7.13 inches of rain (average:  5.74”).  [Low:  0.97” (2007), high:  14.88” (2004).]

So for the first nine months of the year, I have recorded 50.74 inches of precipitation at Mariton, while the average for that time period is 40.68”. So, we are about 10 inches above average.  That is even more amazing when you realize that for the entire year of 1997, I recorded 40.39 inches of precipitation.