Thanks to a cold front that collided with very moist air, and the remnants of Hurricane Ike, we got a lot of rain in the Quad Cities over the weekend. Officially, the National Weather Service office in Moline at the Quad City Airport received 7.09 inches of rain. We're about 7 miles north of the airport, as the crow flies, and the rain topped out our rain gauge this weekend.
It began to rain around noon on Friday and really didn't quit until just before noon today. We were away at my niece's wedding back in Kellogg, IA (which didn't get as much rain as we did in the Quad's), so we weren't here for the rain event. But I understand that it really didn't rain hard, but just steady for nearly two days straight.
When we got home around noon today, it had just stopped raining. I went into the backyard to check the rain total in our gauge. I was astounded to see it was full to the top. As you can see in the above picture, our rain gauge measures up to 5 inches, but full is a little over 5.5 inches. I tipped it a bit to take the picture so you can see the water line.
I guess the good thing is that we really did need the rain and the ground was getting pretty dry. It's supposed to be sunny and beautiful the rest of the week, drying out most of the soggy yards and gardens. Our sump pump is running nearly non-stop and probably will continue to do so until sometime tomorrow.
While we've had some torrential rains earlier this summer, this rain event didn't cause as much damage as some of the earlier rains this year. Some of the area creeks are running bank full, but it's not causing the problems like we had in June of this year. Still, it's not every day - or weekend, for that matter - where you get a rain event that brings such high totals of rainfall. All I know is our yard is really green and it needs mowed in a bad way.
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