Who thinks we'll need water restrictions in Florida

[boca]

It only rained once this winter season and we'll probably have no rain for spring adding to these La Nina type conditions and also fire season will be bad too.

[gatorcane]

nothing a tropical system couldn't balance out...

[JonathanBelles]

u have to remember when we had that rain, we got 13 inches!!

[gatorcane]

well that was up there in Central FL. South FL saw some decent rain but nothing like 13 inches

[JonathanBelles]

true

[FlSteel]

I'm hoping that we don't have a revisitation of 98 again. That was a terrible fire season for the whole state.

[Extremeweatherguy]

you guys are no where near the levels of the drought that occured in the late 90s and early 00s. I can remember it well (as I lived there for parts of that period). I think it was either 97' or 98' when the fires were so bad in central FL that smoke filled the air for days and it would rain ash occassionally. That was a sight indeed. I also remember seeing entire lakes dry up and they actually planted trees down in some of the old dried up lakes. Things changed though a few years back, and conditions returned to near normal. It was funny after the 2004 hurricane season to see the trees that were planted in the lakes all covered with water again. I think that with a continued active hurricane season...there should be no worry of a drought to that magnitude.

[clfenwi]

As FlSteel said, the year of the fires was '98.

An easy thing to forget about that year was that there actually was a wet winter (check out February of 1998 in the statewide precipitation averages ; see also the bottom of the east central Florida June-July 1998 heat wave page).
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For those wondering, here are the current year to date departures from normal preciptation (in inches) for select cities:
TLH -1.53
JAX -1.36
DAB -2.01
ORL -2.64
TPA 4.25
FMY -2.17
PBI -2.53
FLL 0.01
MIA -0.64