Will it ever rain again in Pierce County? Here’s the National Weather Service forecast

Pierce County is dry, but not as dry as other areas of the state, weather and ecology experts say.

Rain doesn’t look likely for the next 10 days in most of the state including Pierce County, according to precipitation forecasts from the Northwest River Forecast Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Dev McMillian, a National Weather Service meteorologist in the Seattle forecast office, confirmed that the forecast doesn’t include rain in the Tacoma area and surrounding Pierce County for the foreseeable future.

“Things are looking largely dry for the most part,” McMillian said. “If there’s any change, we seem to trend cooler as we go into next week but no rainfall appears to be on the horizon at least throughout the next seven days.”

McMillian said most of this is because of a “ persistent ridge of high pressure above us,” which “typically leads to warm and dry conditions.” A ridge forms when strong winds in the upper atmosphere, forming the jet stream, arc northward in their path across the earth.

The dry conditions aren’t abnormal for the months of July and August, which typically are the driest times of the year based on National Weather Service records going back to the 1900s, McMillian said.

Statewide drought emergency

Rain is just one of several factors that impact water supply and drought conditions in Pierce County and western Washington.

Pierce County is included in a statewide drought emergency ordered by the Washington State Department of Ecology in April, excluding limited metro areas of Tacoma, Seattle and Everett which have utility systems that are better able to withstand drought conditions because of water reservoirs and other management strategies.

Communities access their water supply from various sources that can be more or less vulnerable to drought, such as surface water streams, ground water systems or reservoirs, according to the Department of Ecology’s Statewide Drought Lead Caroline Mellor and Water Resources Communications Manager Jimmy Norris.

Bigger cities like Tacoma, Seattle and Everett have robust reservoirs to store water, but smaller, rural communities that rely on snowpack for their water can be hit harder by drought conditions, Norris said. Tacoma Water serves people throughout Pierce and King counties, according to Tacoma Public Utilities .

The drought order is in effect until April 15, 2025 unless it is terminated before then, the emergency order said.

The state is also concerned with heightened wildfire risks because of the hot, dry conditions, according to Department of Ecology Deputy Communications Director Andrew Wineke. The Department of Natural Resources announced a statewide burn ban on July 10. Smoke forecasts across the state are available on the Washington Smoke Blog .

More so than precipitation, one of the main drivers of the drought declaration was low snowpack in the state, Mellor said. In a normal year, snow in the mountains would gradually melt off throughout spring and summer. An unusually warm winter led to more precipitation coming down as rain instead of snow, and that melted some of the snow too quickly.

The emergency order said that this past winter was the state’s eighth hottest since 1895, which worsened an existing snowpack deficit resulting from the statewide drought declared in July 2023.

“When the snow melts too early, it goes throughout the river and into the ocean and is no longer available for use,” she said.

What is normal for this time of year?

An area is considered to have drought conditions when its water supply is expected to fall under 75 percent of normal levels and there is a risk of “undue hardship” to people and the environment from the lack of water, according to the Department of Ecology . Most people in Pierce County are not likely to experience “undue hardship,” but other areas of western Washington and the rest of the state may see impacts on their domestic drinking water supply, agriculture, fish and stream flows, Mellor said.

Across western Washington, streams and rivers are seeing lower flows, with some areas at 50% of normal levels, according to Mellor. “Normal” is the average level for these streams or rivers from the last 30 years, from 1991 to 2020, she said.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Drought Monitor categorized most of Pierce County as “abnormally dry” in a snapshot of the state’s drought conditions. “Abnormally dry” refers to an area either going into drought or coming out of it. An explanation of each drought intensity category is available on the National Weather Service website .

Areas of the state that have raised particular concern are mostly in central Washington, including Yakima, as well the Olympics region and Whatcom and Skagit counties in the North Cascades region, according to Mellor.

The drought order allows the Department of Ecology to distribute grants for communities struggling with the impacts of drought on their public drinking water, agriculture, stream flows and fish, as well as expedite the processing of applications to transfer water rights to people who need them, Mellor said. Water rights allow the holder to use a certain amount of water for a particular purpose like irrigation or a municipal water supply, for a designated period of time at a designated place, according to the Department of Ecology.

Mellor said that current climate change models predict more snowpack-related droughts in the future. By 2050, the models predict that 40% of future years will have such droughts.

The atmospheric rivers that western Washington saw in early June were too little, too late to stop the drought, and folks should remember that droughts are caused by a variety of factors beyond precipitation, according to Mellor and Norris.

“Every drought declaration I get calls from people saying: ‘How can you say it’s a drought? It’s raining. Look how wet it is out,’” Norris said. “But . . . it’s less about the water coming out of the sky and more about the water available to us to use.”