Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

April Showers Below Normal

April showers may bring May flowers, but there were few showers during the month of April.

According to local meteorologist John Teeter, Prescott was almost two inches below normal in rainfall for April. The normal amount the area receives during the fourth month of the year is 5.25 inches.

But, only 3.35 inches fell, leaving a deficit of 1.90 inches.

This bodes ill for the remainder of the year, as the region is now 5.50 inches below normal for this time of the year.

Under normal conditions the area gets 18.54 inches of rain through the first four months of a year. This year, though, only 13.04 inches has fallen.

In Cale, weatherman Davis Benton said 2.37 inches of wet stuff fell, bringing the year's total to 14.05 inches.

This, he said, is well below normal.

Benton said there was scattered frost in the south part of the county April 9, with the lowest temperature of the month recorded on this day at 32 degrees.

The highest the mercury climbed in the Cale area was 88 on April 19.

Teeter said there was only one watch or warning posted in April, which is highly unusual. Normally there are seven watches or warnings issued.

"That one watch," Teeter said, "produced dangerous conditions." This is because the night of April 24-25 there was volatile weather.

"We put out a manned weather watch at 2 p.m. I went to my watch point," he said, "at the airport, two miles east of the station. When the wall cloud passed from my line of vision, I returned to the weather center."

Teeter said the spotters were watching two "doughnuts" below the approaching wall cloud. The southern most doughnut started rotating and extending a tail earthward.

"We watched this rotation for several minutes," he said. "The view was clear and the event well defined. I reached for my camcorder to film the event, but the battery was dead and the nearest good batteries were six blocks away.

"I'll probably never get another chance to record such a clearly defined weather event. Believe me, I'll have extra batteries the next time."

The average daily temperature in April was 60.2 degrees. The highest the mercury climbed in Prescott was 85 on April 20, while the low was 34 degrees.

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