It's a dry fall up here means it's won't be a pretty fall. Leaves will just turn brown and fall off, rather than pretty colors. My grass is dead (and I don't care).

Rebecca, I agree that autumn color seems dismal so far. Down here in southcentral OK, we should have had enough rainfall for the foliage to be healthy and colorful, but since we've stayed so hot for so long, I don't know if we are going to get to see that color. Y'all have been so dry up there that I imagine you won't have much autumn color. We never have good autumn color here in a very dry year.

When the folks on news channels or The Weather Channel show photos or videos of gorgeous autumn color from more northern portions of the USA, I love seeing it. We just don't often get a lot of those vivid colors here.

The autumn color we're seeing here lately? Oh, there's yellow, and orange and red, but it is the flames burning through pastures and cedar trees in grassfires turned wildfires. That's the wrong kind of autumn color.

Dawn

Sorry you're seeing fires, Dawn!

I have it figured out now, carefully spray BT on greens, receive 1/2 inch of rain. I'm not even complaining. Thinking of washjng my car.

I have washed every vehicle, watered grass, left windows open, cut hay and even did a little rain jig!!!! I give up we can't buy a rain. At least we are not having fires.

In some parts of OKC that have gotten rain the trees are trying to color but even those are having a hard time.

i am just really dreading spring if it stays this dry all winter. Maybe it will turn and our spring will be wet. Sounds good to me.

Amy, They aren't too bad yet, but I feel for the farmers/ranchers losing their bales of hay, pastures that could have been winter forage, barns, tractors, trucks, trailers, etc. Even one fire is devastating to the person whose place burns up. The odd thing about recent fires is how quickly they've spread. Our grassy fields look deceptively green but apparently are drier than they seem. Normally that's not an issue until after the first freeze when everything dries out and goes dormant pretty quickly, and we haven't even been close to having a freeze yet.

There was a grass fire over the weekend that was pretty far from our place. Eventually I think that 10 of our county's 14 VFDs were out there fighting it, including our, and they were out there for several hours. I was shocked when the fire was first paged out because I could walk out into the yard and stand in the driveway beside my garden and see the smoke, which surely was a good 12-15 miles from us. Both the rate at which it spread and the speed with which it spread (not to mention the huge smoke plume) was shocking. It was sort of a wake-up call that winter fire season is coming. After our guys and trucks were out at that fire, which was well to our east, another fire was paged out in the Thackerville area. That one seemed to take quite a while and a lot of water as well. The next day there was a barn fire out west. I guess it is already that time of the year, though it sure doesn't seem like it should be. We've been fairly busy with medical calls and motor vehicle accidents, but there haven't been that many grass fires or wildland fires. I hope we're not about to have an early start to the fire season. We're hoping the weekend was just an odd blip and not a sign that activity is picking up already. No good comes of a fire season that starts in October. It is bad enough when it starts in November.

When the "Fire Danger" graphic reappears on the NWS-Norman webpage, I do start paying more attention to the fire weather. This graphic is beginning to pop up sporadically the last couple of weeks. It was there this morning.

I think we are going to have a very warm Halloween weekend, so I hope the kids and their parents didn't plan any Halloween costumes that are too heavy or too hot.

I'm glad you got rain even if it means you have to respray the greens with Bt again. I am all for whatever works to bring rain. When I walked down to the mailbox, I could see the big clouds that are very far away---probably near Ada or possibly even further north. It looks like they are having some stormy weather.

Stockergal, Y'all really have been rain deficit pretty much all year, and that's unusual. Look how long it has been since Lisa has had to pour 5 or 6" out of her rain gauge before it starts overflowing? She used to have to do that pretty often, but not one single time this year that I can remember.

Honestly, if we have to have drought, let's have it in winter, and hope the rain comes back for spring and summer. In some prior years I did handle winter/early spring drought incorrectly by sort of ignoring it. I put off watering the garden, thinking that surely it would rain any day now and I just waited and waited and waited for rain (which failed to materialize), and the plants struggled because they were too dry too early in the season. I'm smarter now and I'll irrigate in February and beyond after planting, but if I am going to do that, then the spring and or summer rains had better return at some point so that the early irrigation wasn't a wasted effort. Nothing is more frustrating that watering for 2 or 3 months while you wait for drought to break and rain to return, and then you gradually realize the drought isn't going to break and the rain isn't returning any time soon.

Oddly (you know, October is sort of our second April), some of the parts of OK that are receiving or could receive rain today might get some severe weather, including hail. Can we not just have some badly-needed rain fall merely as rain without there being some severe weather included with it? Sometimes I think back to some lovely, long-lived gentle rain showers from the early 2000s where we sat out on the porch or the covered patio for hours and watched nice, gentle rain showers, followed by rainbows and excited frogs venturing out to play in the puddles, and I wonder why that so rarely happens any more. Rain showers seem to come fewer and farther between in recent years, and then we get either 0.10" or we get 6-12" in one day and flooding instead of getting a nice, gentle inch or two or three.

Dawn

I came back to add that I have The Weather Channel on for background noise and they just said that there is 1" hail covering the ground near downtown Ada. I don't know if I'd be happy about that if I were there. I suspect the damage from the hail might cancel out the benefit of getting rain.

Those of you who prayed for rain.....it has been raining in parts of southeastern and southcentral OK this afternoon, and with some strong wind gusts and hail. I think your prayers worked....they just didn't work for your county. Part of our county currently is under a Severe Thunderstorm Warning thru 7 pm, with hail to the size of quarters and wind gusts to 60 mph. My part of the county is not currently warned, but maybe some of the rain will escape from the big storm and come fall here. ANY amount of rain would be better than none at all.

The thunderstorm made it to us and THEN the NWS issued a Severe Thunderstorm Warning for us. We had tons of lightning, thunder, moderate wind and briefly heavy rain. Our electronic rain gauge shows 0.75" of rain, but the plastic one stuck in the ground only caught 0.50". The two gauges sit about 20' apart, so I'm not sure why there is such a discrepancy, but the size of the puddles in the yard make me lean towards thinking our rainfall was closer to that 0.75". They lost power in town for a while, and ours out here flickered on and off several times, but never went out for more than 15 or 20 seconds at a time. Of course, with power out in town, we lost Internet Service and the satellite TV. This was pretty much a surprise rainstorm as we only had a very, very slim chance of rain here as the storms were expected to go east of us (which they mostly did), and the QPF didn't show us getting much rain. We're grateful for every drop that fell. People who got the more severe storms in counties near us seem to have a lot more wind and hail damage than we had. I'm not even sure we had hail. Chris thought he could hear hail, but in the pitch black darkness outside, we couldn't see any hailstones on the ground.

We'll see what the new Drought Monitor shows tomorrow. It only will reflect rainfall received and reported as of 7 a.m. Tuesday.