You sure can't complain about the weather this month. It's been beautiful in Baltimore. A little morning fog, maybe. And those clouds off the Atlantic slipped across much of the region yesterday and grayed things up a bit. But on the whole it's been a spectacular end to a very warm and dry summer.

The only complaint you could make would be about the continuing lack of rainfall. BWI has recorded just 0.35 inch of precipitation in September. That's more than 2 inches below normal for the month so far. And there's not much in the forecast, either, at least not until the middle of next week. And even that's not promising very much.

We still have 10 days to go, of course. And there's always the possibility that a tropical system will send a few showers our way. But here's how our rainfall stacks up so far against other very dry Septembers:

1884:  0.09 inch

1967:  0.21 inch

1906:  0.32 inch

2007:  0.35 inch*

1930:  0.37 inch

1970:  0.46 inch

1941:  0.50 inch

* Through 9/20

And, now that the meteorological summer and is over (and the calendar summer ends on Sunday morning) here is the Summer 2007 issue of the Sterling Reporter, the quarterly newsletter from the NWS Sterling Forecast Office. It has a nifty map of the Harford County tornado damage, and a few features on the forecasters we quote from time to time. Nice to put a face to a name.