Two weeks ago we looked at how the drought is affecting two Delaware waterways - the St. Jones River and Brandywine Creek. Today I'd like to look at the Christina River; specifically, how the recent rains have affected the long-term drought situation.

The river monitoring station is near Coochs Bridge, about three miles south of Newark. The black line on this chart traces the streamflow on the river for each day this month. A typical flow rate in March would be somewhere in the shaded region, between 150 and 300 gallons a second. Notice that except for short periods of time during and immediately after rains on March 3, 10, 13, 18, and 20, the flow rate is well below this typical range.

We are a little better off now than we were at the beginning of the month, when streamflow was running less than 40 gallons per second. This past Sunday, the flow rate was about 80 gallons per second, but that's still less than half the long-term average.