Saskatoon rain: Every little drop helps

Saskatoon got a good dose of a rain on Wednesday, but a lot more is needed to replenish rain barrels and gardens as the city deals with the driest spring on record.

“It’s just a skiff and we know it takes a good soaking of rain for the moisture to get down into the ground. You just go to your garden and you think it’s soaking, and you dig down a little bit and it’s bone dry,” said Terri Lang, meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Lang is looking back at the last year to put it into perspective as she looks back over the past 12 months.

“Precipitation, annually, is 353.7 millimetres for the Saskatoon area. Over the past year, we’ve had 143.3 millimetres,” Lang said.

That works out to just under 14 inches of rain, on average, per year. Over the past 12 months, Saskatoon has had about five inches.

But Lang is hopeful we’ll close that gap during the month of June.

“It’s the wettest month out of the year,” Lang said.

But we’ve got a ways to go.

“Up until (Tuesday), we had four millimetres. (Up to 11 a.m.), we have had just over one millimetre. So that brings us up to about five millimetres for the month, which is still way below the average, which is 65.8 for a 30-year average,” Lang said.