More rain in Georgia’s forecast. Here’s what it means for the drought.

Recent rains have made a dent in Georgia’s extreme drought conditions, but experts warn it could still take until 2027 before the state fully recovers.

And that’s if otherwise normal conditions continue into the fall and winter months.

Georgia is experiencing the state’s worst drought in nearly 20 years.

Parts of the state got more than five inches of rain this week, giving weather and climate experts a reason to be optimistic, but it won’t solve the problem.

“We need a few more of those types of weeks to really, really break out of this,” said Chris Fuhrmann, deputy director and regional climatologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Regional Climate Center.

The U.S. drought monitor’s recent map, released Thursday, shows a patchwork of conditions across the Peach State. Much of the state is in severe drought conditions, but parts of North and Middle Georgia are in extreme drought conditions.

Southeast Georgia between Florida and South Carolina continues to be in exceptional drought conditions.

The rain was enough to improve some areas in extreme drought conditions and improved parts of the most critical areas, moving them from exceptional to severe conditions, Fuhrmann said.

To look ahead first requires a look backward to last spring and summer. Georgia had a wet spring and part of the summer, but then the rain stopped.

“It was like the faucet just got turned off in August,” Fuhrmann said.

Couple that with a mild hurricane season and a dry winter, and parts of the state found themselves with a 15-inch water deficit, he said. The spring also was dry, but the bigger issue was how quickly temperatures warmed up.

“It was kind of like a trifecta,” he said.

The National Weather Service in Peachtree City has forecast more rain, mostly from thunderstorms, this weekend and into next week. But a longer period of sustained rain is needed to break the drought, said Pam Knox, a climatologist and director of University of Georgia’s Weather Network who retired Friday.

The state needs roughly one inch of rain a week to maintain normal conditions, but at the same time, if the entire 15-inch deficit or an amount remotely close to that happened at once, the water would run off and flood areas instead of being absorbed into the ground, Knox said. In North Georgia, the clay soil can only take 1/10 of an inch before the water begins to run off, she said.

What’s needed instead is a stationary weather front or a tropical system, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a named storm to have impact, she said. So-called “pop-up” storms provide some relief, but by their very nature, one part of a city could get rain while another remains dry.

Otherwise, “we’re just another dry week away from going into drought conditions,” Knox said.

She and other meteorologists are looking ahead to winter when a climate pattern known as El Nino could reach a record. The weather phenomenon is a cyclical global weather event characterized by warmer ocean temperatures that trigger higher rainfall and abnormal temperatures.

In the Southeast, experts forecast a wetter winter and cooler temperatures, mostly because of cloud cover.

“That will probably be the time we catch up on this moisture deficit,” Knox said.

Scientists warn the “super” El Nino could lock in warmer temperatures for the foreseeable future. This would be on top of what the U.S. and rest of the world is experiencing because of climate change.

“Climate change has always been about the extremes on both sides of the ledger,” said J. Marshall Shepherd, Director of UGA’s Atmospheric Sciences Program. “It’s counter-intuitive to people that you can have extreme dry conditions and crippling downpours at the same time, but it’s exactly what we always expected.”