Amarillo got 6.12 inches of rain in late September, more than it had since early March

Amarillo picked up 6.12 inches of rain between Sept. 24 and Sept. 29, more than the 6.06 inches that fell in the 202 days from March 6 through Sept. 23. The comparison appears in the October monthly drought outlook from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, written by forecaster Richard Tinker. Six days of late-September rain roughly doubled the Texas Panhandle city’s total for the stretch since early spring.

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The same outlook uses the soaking to argue for drought relief across much of the southern United States this month.

Six days that outweighed 202

The Climate Prediction Center’s drought discussion reports Amarillo’s 6.12 inches for Sept. 24-29 alongside the 6.06 inches recorded from March 6 to Sept. 23. Tinker links the burst to a late-September rain event and the breakdown of a mid-level ridge, the high-pressure dome that had parked over the South-Central states and kept drought entrenched. Before the pattern flipped, the agency’s summary says, drought persisted or intensified across the South-Central states and the Lower Mississippi Valley, with very little rain and heat well above normal.

The National Weather Service office in Lubbock documented the storms in its summary of the Sept. 24-26 event. Showers and thunderstorms were fed by monsoon moisture and a storm system over the Desert Southwest, and the heaviest rain landed in eastern New Mexico and the southwestern Texas Panhandle. Along the Highway 60 corridor from near Canyon through Hereford and Friona, many locations received 2 to 3 inches or more on Thursday evening, and over four days a swath of 3 to 5 inches or more fell from around Amarillo through Friona and Clovis.

The rain was far from uniform. Lubbock’s airport recorded 1.47 inches, about 4 inches below its year-to-date average, and Childress Airport logged 0.80 inches. Parts of the Rolling Plains received little or none, and the Lubbock office said heavier rain around Clovis, New Mexico, caused widespread flash flooding. On the Texas side, it noted, overnight storms moved quickly enough that significant flooding was not expected. The spread between the soaked Panhandle swath and the dry Rolling Plains shows why a single-station comparison like Amarillo’s is dramatic locally but cannot stand in for a statewide average, and why the drought categories for the region will not all move together.

The October outlook for the Plains and the South

Tinker’s outlook turns that rainfall into a forecast. For the South, the discussion says heavy early-October rain should reverse recent drought and favors above-normal October totals, with improvement or removal expected in all current drought areas. Confidence is high, though moderate over Tennessee. In the High Plains, improvement is expected across the eastern Great Plains and the southern tier after late-September and early-October rain, with persistence elsewhere and dry leanings from northern Colorado and central Nebraska northward.

The outlook summary sketches the national split. Improvement is favored from the Southwest through the southern High Plains, most of the Great Plains, the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Eastern Seaboard. Persistence or worsening is favored from the southeastern California deserts north through the Great Basin, Pacific Northwest, central and northern Rockies and northern High Plains, and across the northern Great Lakes into the upper Mississippi Valley, where precipitation is expected near or below normal.

The forecast is not uniform across the Southeast either. The discussion expects drought removal south of Virginia, where heavy rain and above-normal October totals are favored, and holds low confidence for the Northeast, where improvement or removal is forecast by the end of the month.

Texas drought still reaches most of the state

A single wet week does not erase a long deficit. Drought.gov’s Texas page showed 78.4% of the state in drought on mid-October data, with about 22.0 million residents living in drought areas. By category, 30.6% of Texas was in moderate drought, 32.9% in severe, 13.8% in extreme and 1.1% in exceptional drought, with a further 16.7% abnormally dry.

Those numbers come from the U.S. Drought Monitor, whose current map is valid for Oct. 13, 2026 and was released Oct. 15, with Lindsay Johnson of the High Plains Regional Climate Center listed as author. The outlook itself used the Drought Monitor valid Sept. 22 as its starting point, two days before the Sept. 24 rain began, so the October assessment looks ahead from a map that predates the soaking. The Panhandle’s improvement is therefore a forecast built on the rain, not yet a measured change in the monitor’s categories, and the outlook’s high confidence for the South does not extend equally to every county.

The Climate Prediction Center’s next monthly drought outlook is due Oct. 31 at 3:00 p.m. EDT. By then the Drought Monitor will have had several weeks to absorb the Panhandle’s late-September rainfall, and the November outlook will show whether the improvement Tinker favored for the southern High Plains actually arrived.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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