Weather forecasts in areas of North Carolina this summer have played like a needle on a scratched vinyl record, bouncing backward in a repeating loop: dry and hot, dry and hot, dry and hot.
Well before high temperatures with heat indexes climbing into triple digits smothered the air hanging over portions of the state, coastal counties being no exception, the land beneath our feet was parched.
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The North Carolina Drought Management Advisory Council, or DMAC, announced at the beginning of this year that the state was experiencing widespread dry conditions, the result of a drought the origins of which trace back to August 2025. About a week into the new year, 15 of the state’s 20 coastal counties were classified as abnormally dry.
By June’s end, Brunswick County Public Utilities customers were placed under mandatory water restrictions. As June turned over to July, drought conditions in that county further deteriorated.
Though the western portion of North Carolina’s southernmost coastal county as of Aug. 18 remained under exceptional drought, the highest drought classification, rain since July has relieved dry conditions marginally but enough to prompt the county to ease water, though not completely lift, water use restrictions.
North Carolina has since last month started to see some notable rainfall, particularly in the western part of the state and northern part of the coast, said Klaus Albertin, DMAC chair and water resources engineer with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources.
“Most areas are starting to see improvements, and a lot of the state, lawns, gardens, agriculture is looking good because we’ve been getting regular rains,” he said. “Not everywhere improves at the same rate. That’s kind of the tough part about the summertime in North Carolina. We’ll get some rains that are really spotty, so you’ll have areas that get 2, 3, 3½ inches, but then, not far away, they may only get a quarter of an inch.”
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This helped some state reservoirs recover their water levels faster than others.
Rainfall in the watershed above Jordan Lake, for example, helped that reservoir bounce back to its target water level within a couple of weeks, Albertin said.
Falls Lake, which is a little more than 30 miles northeast of Jordan Lake, hasn’t been as lucky.
“It’s going to take some good rains or a lot of smaller, consistent rains to bring all of them back up to where we’d like to see them,” Albertin said.
As for aquifers, he said, “I would say, instead of weeks you probably are looking at months, and some of it just takes a while for the water to percolate down into the aquifers.”
Gabrielle Chianese, DWR’s Groundwater Resource Branch supervisor, explained that there are portions of the state where groundwater, or superficial aquifer wells, are showing decreases.
“However, the deeper aquifers, the only way the drought really impacts those deeper aquifers is due to higher usage,” including lawn irrigation, she said. “That’s when we’ll see impacts to the lower aquifers. But all of these seem to be recovering very well, especially the ones that the deeper aquifers that are being used more, we are seeing recovery in those so that’s good news.”
She encourages private well water owners to have their well water tested, a service typically provided by county health departments for a fee.
Parts of the state continue to face lingering rainfall deficits despite recent summer storms.
As of Aug. 18, Wilmington, for example, was at a 21-inch rain deficit.
“It just goes to show that we haven’t really had a whole lot of rain, especially in some parts of the state, since last August,” of 2025, said North Carolina State Climate Office Director Dr. Jared Bowden.
And the hot weather much of the state has experienced this summer has only aided and abetted drought conditions.
Intense heat paired with dry conditions creates what is called a “hot drought,” which amplifies the loss of moisture in the soil.
“If you basically dry out the soil then all the energy goes into heating up that surface and then it gets just hotter, so it feels hotter, and that’s because all the energy goes directly into heating the surface rather than evaporation,” Bowden said. “There’s this coupling process as the atmosphere continues to warm and it becomes thirstier that you get these hotter and drier droughts.”
This, he explained, is a fingerprint of the changing climate.
According to the State Climate Office, North Carolina over the last 120 years has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit.
“This is less than Earth as a whole, which has warmed by nearly two degrees,” the office states.
But warming has accelerated in recent decades, with the period between 2009 and 2018 becoming the state’s warmest recorded decade.
Wetter weather patterns ahead?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in early June confirmed that the globe was officially in an El Niño year. El Niño is a recurring weather phenomenon that forms when the sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean are warmer than average.
And, Bowden said, its impacts are already being felt.
“Hurricanes, like them or not, they do contribute to our climatological rainfall into late fall in particular,” he said. “Basically, El Niño is decreasing the likelihood that we’ll have significant rains from a tropical-like system.”
What does that mean for say, Brunswick County? As we move into peak hurricane season, if the probability for a named storm is low, so too is the likelihood of short-term drought relief.
“But, as you go into the fall, when El Niño picks up in strength, the impacts are for a wetter winter,” Bowden explained.
In fact, in the coming months – October, November and into December – North Carolina could experience similar rain events to those of 2015, when there was in a strong El Niño.
“We had our wettest December on record, and the strong El Niño event of 1997 and ’98, we had our wettest winter on record for the state of North Carolina,” Bowden said. “That’s kind of where we’re headed. Ideally, it’s going to be months of needed rain. I mean, of course, you can get the big hurricane — even that would just really put a dent in something like that — but the odds of that type of event are not as likely. It will probably be more steady rainfall over the winter months that would bring places like Wilmington that are currently, over the last year, in 20-inches-plus deficit to get them back to normal. But, the short term is we might stay dry for a little longer across the state.”
