Here in Athens GA, it has rained every day so far this November. It is raining now as I write this. That makes seven days in a row with measurable rainfall. My mushrooms are doing great! I’ve been asked more than once how unusual this is. To answer this question, the easiest source of information I know is the cli-MATE system from the Midwestern Regional Climate Center.
To get the information you need, go to https://mrcc.isws.illinois.edu/CLIMATE/. You have to have a free account to log in. For some reason, I have to log in twice to get recognized, but they tell me it is a problem with my computer’s cookies, so this should not be a big issue. Choose your station, and go to the left menu to get Station Data–>Daily Data–>Threshold Search. Pick the time period of interest (I usually use the Period of Record) and run the search for Precipitation greater than or equal to 0.01 inches. You can choose to look at Runs of days meeting a threshold on the bottom right and choose the minimum length of the run. I listed out the dates so that I could separate the runs out by the time of year.
When I do this, I find that the last time Athens had a run of six days of rain in November was 1954. That’s a long time ago! For a run of seven days, you have to back to 1930, even longer. So this is definitely an unusual occurrence for this time of year, although not unprecedented. The longest run for any time of year was 14 days in June 1963. I doubt we’ll break that.
You can use this tool to look for counts of number of days with freezes, runs of hot temperatures and lengths of dry periods as well, just change the search criteria to suit your needs.
