UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- If there was any doubt, Hurricane Isabel washed it away -- 2003 will go down in history as the wettest year on record for most of Pennsylvania, according to a precipitation expert in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

"It started raining last October and it really hasn't stopped," says Bryan Swistock, a water resources specialist with Penn State Cooperative Extension. "We got into a weather pattern where storms moving from the south up along the coast brought lots of moisture to Pennsylvania, and it looks like it is continuing."

After five years of prolonged drought that left ground water levels at historic lows in the southeastern part of the Keystone State, the turnaround has been sudden, dramatic and complete. Streams and rivers are running bank full, reservoirs are overflowing and groundwater across the state has been fully recharged. According to Swistock, many farmers went from consecutive years of crop loss due to lack of moisture to struggling to find periods dry enough to put equipment on their fields to plant, tend and harvest their crops.

"The four-month period of May through August was by far the wettest ever recorded in all of Pennsylvania, with 23 inches of rain falling -- close to 2 inches more than we ever had during that period," he says. "Most parts of the state have already received 35 inches for the year."

While Isabel did not bring nearly as much rain to the Northeast as was expected, she reminded weather forecasters of another infamous woman in Pennsylvania's past.

"This won't go down as the wettest summer ever for the southeastern part of the state," says State Climatologist Paul Knight, an instructor in Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. "In 1972, Hurricane Agnes dumped 16 inches of rain on southeastern counties. For that region, that year's precipitation record might never be eclipsed." So what is causing these deluges? "I don't know whether you can attribute them to anything," Swistock says. "It is just the weather pattern we have been in since last fall. We really don't know why it has happened."

Knight suspects the cause of the weather pattern has something to do with water temperatures in the North Atlantic or the northern Pacific Ocean. "Let's look at this weather pattern in context," he explained. "It has wiped out the drought that existed in the southeastern United States, too. The whole eastern part of the country has changed from hot and dry to cool and wet. We don't yet understand the mechanism that would cause a change of this magnitude. We are still learning about how that works."

For years, Knight noted, a lot of weather patterns have been attributed to water temperature changes in the South Pacific. But this is different. "There have been no significant changes in the South Pacific," he said. "It is not related to El Nino or La Nina."

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EDITORS: Contact Bryan Swistock at 814-863-0194 or by e-mail at brs@psu.edu.

Contact:

Jeff Mulhollem jjm29@psu.edu 814-863-2719 814-863-9877 fax #249