There are some feeble mentions of rain in the forecast from the National Weather Service's Sterling office. There's some expected, maybe, this weekend, and more perhaps in the middle of next week. But with a week to go, March could still become the driest on record for Baltimore.

Instruments at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport have recorded just 0.18 inch of rain so far this month. (Just 0.27 inch since the Feb. 11-12 snowstorm.) But we could get another quarter-inch between now and April 1 and still nail a new record for the month. For now, the driest March since record-keeping began here in 1871 was in 1910 - 96 years ago - when only 0.46 inch fell on the city.

Looking back, that very dry March 1910 was followed by a wet April and June. But the summer and autumn that followed were very dry. Summer was more than 2 inches short of normal rainfall. Past is not necessarily prologue in the weather game, of course.

But the present sure looks dry. Maryland's streams are slowing to a relative trickle. Nearly all the gauged streams across the state are running at very low volumes for the date. You can see the trend well in these graphs.